Joomlashack on YouTube, plus a new online Joomla Day

Joomlashack on YouTube, plus a new online Joomla Day

One of the most common requests we've had from Joomlashack members is more video tutorials. 

Sure, there's a lot of documentation available for Joomlashack products, but many of your are visual learners. So we've launched the Joomlashack YouTube channel. Look out for interesting Joomla how-to videos every week.

Read more: Joomlashack on YouTube, plus a new online Joomla Day

Say Hello to Shack Article Manager, our 28th Extension

Over the last few years, we've been adopting extensions here at Joomlashack.

These extensions include Tabs and SlidersJCal ProjInbound, Shack FormsShack Toolbox and Shack Open Graph amongst others. These are powerful and mature extensions that users love. 

Joomlashack users have given us many suggestions for other extensions to adopt. One idea has been suggested far more than any other: User Article Manager. This extension was really popular in early Joomla versions. It allowed you to accept articles from the frontend of your site. It also allowed writers to manage their articles without logging into the Joomla admin.

Read more: Say Hello to Shack Article Manager, our 28th Extension

Want to Test Our New Extension: Shack Article Manager?

Shack Article Manager

Over the last few years, we've been adopting extensions here at Joomlashack.

These extensions include Tabs and SlidersJCal ProjInbound, Shack FormsShack Toolbox and Shack Open Graph amongst others. These are powerful and mature extensions that users love. 

Joomlashack users have given us many suggestions for other extensions to adopt. One idea has been suggested far more than any other: User Article Manager. You can see some of the suggestions in the comments on this post about User Article Manager. Thanks in particular to Joe Sonne for repeatedly encouraging us.

User Article Manager was really popular in early Joomla versions. It allowed you to accept articles from the frontend of your site. It also allowed writers to manage their articles without logging into the Joomla admin.

Read more: Want to Test Our New Extension: Shack Article Manager?

Say Hello to the new OSCampus Pathways Module

Say Hello to the new OSCampus Pathways Module

OSCampus now includes a module called OSCampus Pathways. The module produces a stylish frontend preview of your online training pathways and their courses.

Once you update ti OSCampus 1.4.3, you will get the OSCampus Pathways module automatically installed. 

In this blog post, I will give you a brief tour of this new module. You will learn how it looks at your Joomla site public frontend. You will also take a look at what backend settings allow you to customize the frontend display.

Read more: Say Hello to the new OSCampus Pathways Module

How to Create Frontend Event Moderators in JCal Pro

How to Assign a Front-End Event Moderator in JCal Pro

JCal Pro is the best calendar extension for Joomla sites.

Over the last weeks, we've talked with several JCal Pro customers who are alllowing users to create events via the frontend of their site. So, we've been writing more documentation to help them, including articles on creating events, registering for events, and giving access to event creation.

This week's tutorial will show you how to allow users to moderate events that are submitted. To create a moderator, you need to follow these five steps:

  1. Create a Joomla user group for your JCal Pro event moderators.
  2. Create a Joomla access level for the moderators.
  3. Set the correct permissions for the moderators.
  4. Choose Joomla users as moderators.
  5. Create a frontend menu link for moderators to use.

Let's take a look at this process in more detail.

Read more: How to Create Frontend Event Moderators in JCal Pro

The Share It plugin is now called Shack Article Sharing

The Share It plugin is now called Shack Article Sharing

Back in January, we looked ahead to 2019 and set three main goals for the year:

  1. Provide customers with a smooth transition to Joomla 4.
  2. Integrate our extensions. For example, we can expand OSMap to provide support for all our new extensions.
  3. Improve the Joomlashack brand by redesigning the logo and rebranding our extensions.

Read more: The Share It plugin is now called Shack Article Sharing

Introducing the New Joomlashack Logo

Introducing the New Joomlashack Logo

I owe a big "Thank You" to the Joomlashack community.

Just over two months ago, I wrote a post called "We Are Working on a New Joomlashack Logo".

I described all the problems we found while trying to design a new logo. In the end, I presented a new version of the logo and said:

Read more: Introducing the New Joomlashack Logo

How to Provide Google Drive Downloads in OSDownloads

How to Add a Google Document to OSDownloads

A few of our customers asked how to set OSDownloads in their Joomla site for a repository of downloadable Google text documents.

Instead of allowing people to simply visit the Google Drive documents, these users wanted to provide them with a direct download link. Users will click the link in OSDownloads and the Google Drive file will download to their desktop.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure OSDownloads to offer to your Joomla site visitors a downloadable Google text document.

Read more: How to Provide Google Drive Downloads in OSDownloads

Our Response to an OSMap SQL Injection Report

Our Response to an OSMap SQL Injection Report
This week, both Joomla and Joomlashack had to deal with inaccurate security reports.
 
The Joomla team posted a detailed rebuttal to one security report. It turns out that the issue was fixed in 2015!

Here at Joomlashack, we were alerted to a possible security issue with OSMap.

To the best of our knowledge, this report is false. We did post our own detailed response on the reporting site called "Packet Storm". However, not only did Packet Storm remove the security report, but other sites picked up the report with our response.

Read more: Our Response to an OSMap SQL Injection Report

How to Create a Registration Form for JCal Pro Events

How to Create a Custom Registration Form for a JCal Pro Events

This week one of our JCal Pro customers asked how to create a custom registration form for their JCal Pro events. They asked this because the default registration form only asks for your name and email address.

You can enhance this default form using JCal Pro's custom form builder. In this blog post, I'll show you how to use it to create a custom registration form for your JCal Pro events.

Read more: How to Create a Registration Form for JCal Pro Events