Listen to the Joomla Podcasts from Watchful and JoomCast

Check Out the Joomla Podcasts from Watchful and JoomCast

If you are a podcast fan, you can find three active Joomla podcasts at the moment.

I'll start with a little self-promotion. One of the three is the Watchful podcast that features myself and Vic from Watchful. Our interviews focus on Joomla agencies: how they manage products, find customers, manage their cashflow and so on.

Another is JoomCast and it's a collaboration between Naveen from Joomdev and Tim from Basic Joomla. They interview people from around the Joomla world.

Also, if you speak Spanish, there's also Mastermind Joomla from Carlos Camara, who gave a great session at last year's Joomlashack Conference.

Read more: Listen to the Joomla Podcasts from Watchful and JoomCast

What Analytics Tools Do You Use With Joomla?

What Analytics Tools Do You Use With Joomla?

This week, we've been working on improvements to Shack Analytics.

Joomla site owners often have scripts such as Google Analytics, Adwords, Clicky, Facebook, MailChimp and other sites. But those scripts are hidden away inside random modules, plugins or template files. Shack Analytics can help!

Shack Analytics is a single extension to manage all the analytics code on your sites. Here are guides for using some popular analytics scripts with Joomla:

After installing Shack Analytics, you'll see a single dashboard with room to add the analytics for your site.

Read more: What Analytics Tools Do You Use With Joomla?

Getting Started with the Download Form in OSDownloads Pro

Beginner Guide to Downloads Form in OSDownloads Pro

OSDownloads is the easiest Joomla extension to add file downloads to your Joomla site. You can allow your site visitors to download files with one click, simply clicking the "Download" button. But what if you need to set a more advanced download form for them?

What if you, for example, would like to collect some information from your site visitors before they will be able to download a file? Or what if you wish to display them some information?  

These are exact benefits that the "Download Form" feature in OSDownloads Pro offers you. In this blog post, I will give you a tour to the "Download Form" in OSDownloads Pro.

Read more: Getting Started with the Download Form in OSDownloads Pro

What Are JCal Pro Email Notifications?

What Are JCal Pro Email Notifications

With a robust set of features and intuitive interface, JCal Pro is one of Joomlashack's most sold extensions. With JCal Pro you can quickly and easily create an event calendar for your Joomla site.

But you don't have to create events yourself. JCal Pro allows you to delegate this job to an authorized frontend user. Once they create an event or someone registers for an event, JCal Pro will automatically send email notifications.

In this blog post, you will learn what those email notifications are and to whom they get sent.

Read more: What Are JCal Pro Email Notifications?

JCal Pro Event Registrations Are Now Protected by Google Captchas

JCal Pro Event Registrations Are Now Protectable by Google Captchas

JCal Pro is the best calendaring Joomla extension. The new JCal Pro version released this week now allows you to protect the event registration pages against spam with Google's Captchas.

Setting this is a three-step process:

  1. Register your Joomla site to use Google's Captcha. 
  2. Enable Joomla's captcha plugin.
  3. Enable Google's Captcha in JCal Pro. 

In this blog post, I will give you a brief introduction to this new feature.

Read more: JCal Pro Event Registrations Are Now Protected by Google Captchas

Joomlashack's 2019 Review and Thank You

Joomlashack's 2019 Review and Thank You

Thank you for your support of Joomlashack.

Joomlashack started in 2005, but our team took over the site in 2016. 

We've been running Joomlashack for over three years now, and at the end of every year we write a review. If you want to look back, here is our 2016 review, 2017 review and 2018 review.

Hopefully these are not lame "everything is awesome" posts. We try and give you honesty and insight into Joomlashack's year. Every year there are plenty of ups and downs.

Read more: Joomlashack's 2019 Review and Thank You

How to Customize the JCal Pro Display

How to Customize the JCal Pro Display

Almost every organization's web site can benefit from an events calendar. For Joomla web sites, the obvious and most popular choice is JCal Pro. JCal Pro offers simplicity, flexibility, a robust feature set, and gorgeous templates to fit almost any color scheme.

How do you make the calendar events on your Joomla site look like you want them to? JCal Pro has quite a few design settings. You will take a look at them in this video tutorial from our YouTube channel.

Read more: How to Customize the JCal Pro Display

How Shack Forms Integrates with Zoo

How Shack Forms Intergrates with Zoo

We blogged this week on how Shack Forms can help your Joomla 3-rd party extensions. In this post, you learned how to use Shack Forms as a communication tool for your Community Builder community. In this blog post, you also learned how to use Shack Forms to send messages to owners of entries of a SobiPro directory.

Shack Forms also integrates with Zoo, a popular Joomla extension for building catalogs. With this integration, your site visitors will be able to contact an author of an item of a catalog created via Zoo. In this blog post, I will show you how Shack Forms integrates with Zoo.

Read more: How Shack Forms Integrates with Zoo

How Shack Forms Integrates with SobiPro

How Shack Forms Intergrates with SobiPro

In the previous blog post, you learned that Shack Forms Pro can be a very handy tool for some 3-rd party Joomla extensions. You learned that your Joomla users or Community Builder users can send messages to your Community Builder users via a Shack Form. 

But Shack Forms also integrates with SobiPro, another popular Joomla extension. This integration will allow your site visitors to contact owners of the entries of your SobiPro directory. In this blog post, I will show you how Shack Forms integrates with SobiPro.

Read more: How Shack Forms Integrates with SobiPro

How Shack Forms Integrates with Community Builder

Shack Forms Pro is not just a Joomla extension for building forms. Although it does indeed allow you to quickly and easily build nicely looking forms, it can also complement your 3-rd party Joomla extensions. It integrates with Community Builder, JomSocial, SobiPro and Zoo.

In the case of Community Builder, Shack Forms Pro becomes a communication tool between your Community Builder users and your Joomla users. In this blog post, I will show you how Shack Forms integrates with Community Builder.

Read more: How Shack Forms Integrates with Community Builder