The Techjoomla Blog

Techjoomla is happy to announce our new collaboration with Themexpert for integration of our popular Joomla LMS- Shika with the Academia v3.0 Joomla template from Themexpert.

Academia v3.0

Academia is a 100% responsive educational Joomla template, that is perfect for any type of educational organization. It is crafted with 3 homepage variations and 20 built-in pages.

If you are looking for a beautiful template that offers an official Shika LMS integration, then this is the one we highly recommend.

Shika users can use the coupon code ACADEMIA3 to get a 30% discount on Academia. Note that the coupon code is valid till 31st October, 2017.

Get Academia

Read on to get details of what the integration offers.  

We are happy to bring you Shika 1.1.13 which brings an updated Box API integration which is used for rendering document type lessons.

The older version of our plugin was using legacy Box view APIs which will be having their EOL late this year. Hence the older version is being deprecated. You can find out more about the EOL announcement from box here : https://blog.box.com/blog/new-box-view

This new release is a HUGE step as it opens the doors to several new document types to be supported in the near future as the new API allows for high-fidelity, interactive viewers for documents, images, videos, 360 images and videos, 3D files and dozens of other file types. We will be working on bringing these new enhancements to you as we extend our tracking capabilities to the new file types.

Read on for details and instructions on setting up and migrating to the new plugin.

When it comes to CMS comparisons between the popular content management systems, 'Out of the box SEO Capabilities' are always a very important factor. Now for those who have used Joomla! know that Joomla's SEO capabilities have steadily improved over the years and the new router in Joomla 3.8 takes it up several levels. 

To prove Joomla's mettle in this areas, the Joomla Optimisation team has decided to enter the SEO Contest 'Siebtlingsgeburt' by SEO-Day in Germany (Cologne). It involves an imaginary keyword 'siebtlingsgeburt' which means seven births. We thank the enthusiastic and talented bunch of designers, coders, storytellers, translators who are working to make this happen ! They recently reached out to us and asked us for a little help in their mission to 'Help Captain Joomla save the 7 cute puppies from being killed by “Glatzkröte” (bald toad)' . To make this happen, we are reaching out to you, our community. We need to get as many people as we can linking and visiting the below link. I'd suggest you go there right away, it is a very interesting read ! 

In a nutshell, here is how you can help. 

Joostock is the first Joomla unconference to be held in the Netherlands at Eindhoven on the 7th and 8th October, 2017. As a Joomler, you might have plenty of new ideas along with vast knowledge that you are eager to share. Apart from knowledge and ideas, you also have your own share of problems with Joomla that you tackle everyday.

We are happy to release Shika 1.1.12 with feature support for AltaUserPoints and some bug fixes. We recommend you to upgrade to Shika 1.1.12 as soon as possible. Also don’t forget to read the release notes before upgrading for instructions related to backward compatibility breaks. Read on for the complete changelog.

We are happy to release Shika 1.1.11 with some new features, improvements and bug fixes. We recommend you to upgrade to Shika 1.1.11 as soon as possible. Also don’t forget to read the release notes before upgrading for instructions regarding backward compatibility breaks. Read on for the complete changelog.

Thank you for the fantastic response from all of you on the JTicketing 2.0 release. We are happy to bring you the roadmap for the changes planned in the immediate next release - JTicketing 2.1.

This release is basically a follow up release to complete some features that were originally planned for 2.0 but could not be completed in time for the release and there are some really exciting things in there. One of the major focus areas of this release are a tighter integration with jLike and Shika among other things. This release will also bundle jLike as a core part of jTicketing for free !

If you have been following our blogs and social channels, you will know that we have released several incremental updates in the 1.1x series. In fact we have had to break typical semantic versioning policy in order to push in several small feature updates that could not wait till the next major version.

It has also been decided to introduce Bootstrap 3 sooner than originally planned in terms of version numbers since an increasing number of clients have asked for it. Since this would need a major version release on account of backward compatibility breaks, it warrants a major version.

So here is the proposed roadmap for the upcoming versions of Shika.

For the past couple of months, we have released couple of blogs on some of our infrastructure extensions like TJ vendor and TJ notifications and we thank you for the feedback. We are happy to introduce yet another infrastructure extension-Hierarchy Management.

Hierarchy Management is an horizontal(Infrastructure) extension for Joomla that allows setting up general or context specific hierarchical relations between users which can be further be used by other extensions for a variety of purposes like allowing special access control, reports generation and so on. Hierarchy is currently supported out of the box by TJ Reports for manager reporting and JLike for assignments.

Some of the features of Hierarchy Management are as follows

JGive 2.1 will be the second major release in the JGive nEXT series which introduced a completely revamped UI/UX as well as a host of new features which will be implemented over multiple versions. In addition to the originally planned features and improvements, we have also included a lot of feedback we received after the 2.0 release.

Here’s a quick look at what you can expect in the 2.1 release. P.S. While we were able to get down to penning this blog now, development is already underway on this version !

We are super excited to introduce TJ Reports - our Infrastructure extension that allows developers to easily develop reporting plugins and get extensive reporting capabilities in their extensions. Features include extension specific and multi extension reports, Report default configuration, Report customisation and CSV exports to name a few.

Let’s look at the features it offers in detail as well as how the integration with extensions works. Continue reading for the feature list.

We are happy to announce that Shika now has official support for iSpring SCORM content. Shika developers and technical experts at iSpring recently conducted compatibility tests to ensure that iSpring content works well with Shika.

Authoring good quality SCORM content can be a long and exhausting process. iSpring makes this a breeze ! With iSpring’s suite of authoring tools, you can turn your PowerPoint presentations into supercharged e-courses in a snap. iSpring authoring tools not only preserve animations, triggers and timings of PowerPoint presentations but also allow to enhance them with different types of interactive activities.

iSpring TalkMaster allows you to design interactive dialogue simulations to train your employees' communication skills in a safe environment. With iSpring QuizMaker, creating interactive quizzes is faster and easier than ever before, thanks to the new visual question editing mode. iSpring Cam, records “how to” tutorials and inserts them into your courses or publishes them directly to your YouTube channel.

In the past few weeks we have made incremental upgrades to com_api, our REST API extension for Joomla. For those who are not aware, com_api is a quick and easy way to add REST APIs to Joomla. Extensible via plugins, you can easily add support for more Joomla extensions.  This blog details the changes & improvements done from from 2.0 to 2.2.

The key change is support for SEF URLs, which will enable you to create better URLs for your API endpoints, like /api/articles/article/34. Till now, the API endpoints could only be accessed by Joomla non-sef URLs, making the URLs look clunky.

Few other changes include support for the Authorization header, and being able to override the response envelope for the resources. Also a few bug fixes around viewing logs and a performance improvement for sites that had a lot of API consumers.

Documentation

We have revamped our documentation to make it easy for developers to write their own API plugins. You can find it here : http://techjoomla.github.io/com_api/

Impact

Version 2.0 and onward introduces a backward compatibility break in the default output structure of the response. AppCarvers customers please check the blog on appcarvers.com before you upgrade.

To know about the full changelog, read on.

Joomla World Conference(JWC), the mecca for Joomla users worldwide is going to be held for the very first time in Europe in the eternal city of Rome. This year’s theme for JWC is “Il ponte Italiano” a.k.a The Italian Bridge. Joomla World Conference, 2017 is going to be held from 17th November, 2017 to 19th November, 2017.

The 3 themed days for the event are as follows

The Joomla World Conference, 2017 as always is going to be a blend of learning, fun, work, interactions and a platform for knowledge sharing.

We are happy to bring you Shika 1.1.10 with some bug fixes and usability improvements. We recommend you to upgrade as soon as possible. Do read the release notes before upgrading. Read on for the complete changelog.

We are ecstatic to announce the release of JTicketing 2.0 - the fantastic event management extension for Joomla. Besides a host of new features, this release brings in a fresh new look and the release of some great ‘Infrastructure Extensions’ which empower this release in a big way! This is a major release. Make sure you read the release notes before you upgrade ! The AppCarvers team has also released a new version of the Event Manager’s app which you will need to upgrade to.

To celebrate this release, we are are offering a 15% discount on JTicketing Purchases. This discount is valid till 28th July 2017.

Coupon Code-JT20RLS

Buy Now | See the Updated Demo

Read on for the full list of features.

We have released a new version of Quick2Cart today - version 2.9.6. The highlight of this release is an improved router that makes nicer SEF Urls for core product manager pages. Besides this we have fixed quite a few bugs.

#106293 Frontend :- View Order :- No option to complete payment for guest users if order status is pending

#106168 Frontend :- EasySocial Toolbar is not responsive on mobile view

This release introduces a new feature that has been a horizontal extension for Techjoomla but wasn't released as yet - com_hierarchy. This lets you set context specific hierarchy relations between users. The utilisation for this is mainly to set training managers for users. These 'Managers' shall be able to assign & enrol courses to users under them from the frontend with the new Assignment workflow that is also released in this version. This is also a dependency to our migration to TJ reports which will allow for features like Teacher reports and Manager reports in v1.1.10. 

Besides this major feature, we have also introduced a configuration for Certificate orientation & introduced a spent time column in the attempts view on the frontend. 

Read on for the full change log

We have released a new version of Invitex today - version 3.0.4. This is a maintenance release and has quite a few bug fixes. In addition, the facebook API v2.9 support is added. Read the complete changelog to view what’s new in this release.

Bug fixes(5):

- #105553  Frontend :- Guest Invitation - reCaptcha version 2 not working

We are happy to bring to you a new update in the 1.1x series of Shika - version 1.1.8. In addition to some UI fixes needed for Joomla 3.7x, this version brings some interesting new features like enrolment by User Group, support for CSS and JS overrides and the ability to manually enrol for paid courses in the backend.

Read on for the complete feature list and changelog.