The Techjoomla Blog

There are several eCommerce platforms that sell multiple products. Some of these are well-known (Amazon anyone?), while others are obscure. Irrespective of the size and scale of these sites, customers or online shoppers have one primary expectation. And that is to have an effortless checkout process. This is something that matters even more than the products present on the site. 

Here are some statistics that explain it all:

• Abandonment can cost e-marketers about 2 to 4 Trillion per year.
• 27% of carts were dropped because the checkout process was too complicated or because the site was slow.
• 65% cart abandonment trend leaves a 97.9% gap in conversions.

You certainly don’t want to fall in any of these categories. Let’s look at the top five considerations that you will need while selecting a shopping cart for your eCommerce website.

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most popular and effective tools for marketers. These ads allow marketers to precisely target their audience, create brand awareness, and interact with their consumers. The best part is that this is also one of the most cost-effective ways of advertising for brands.

With numerous social media platforms supporting advertising, it is no surprise that several brands and businesses, and even individuals are making a beeline for getting the word out there. For any website or app, ads are also the best option for monetization/earning revenues.

We have released Email Beautifier v2.1.1 which contains fixes for the bugs reported by some of our subscribers. Please check the changelog given below.

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We are happy to bring you a new update for JTicketing, v2.4.2. We have fixed many bugs in this release. This is primarily a maintenance release to ensure all extensions using 'Techjoomla common library code' function smoothly on the same site. If you are using our other extensions like JGive or Quick2cart or Shika along with JTicketing on the same site, please ensure you upgrade all of these to make those work together.

Please read the release notes carefully before upgrading to the latest version.

It is recommended you upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible to ensure you are on a secure version.

Research suggests that for 48% of events, ticket sales compose 60 to 100% of the revenue!

Therefore, the importance of providing a hassle-free and seamless ticket booking experience cannot be reinforced enough.

Ticket windows for booking events are passé. Nowadays, people are logging online and carrying out a booking for various events – be it a professional conference or a music concert, online is the way to go for them.

For event organizers, it is important to ensure that the online booking system is convenient, provides all the event and venue details with pictures and videos, and offers the best user experience. Today, while event organizers put in a lot of effort and energy in creating a seamless online booking experience, not all the booking systems do the trick. Not if they do not have the required features that make the eventgoers make a beeline for booking.

Here are some of the top five features for event booking systems that have the potential to skyrocket your event sales.

This month’s Joomla User Group-London Meetup will be held on 21 May 2019 at the London South Bank University. Ashwin and Parth - Co-Founders of Techjoomla will be speaking at this event about  "Joomla Backends and JS Frontends".

If you are in London, do plan to attend the session and learn how you can leverage Joomla as a Backend to provide APIs and create abstracted JavaScript frontends with Angular.  As frontends move towards JavaScript we expect more and more projects to take this approach going forward.

They will also discuss how the Techjoomla extensions are used in a wide variety of domains like crowdfunding, e-learning, advertising, and ticketing.

We have released yet another update for our Joomla advertising solution. We are happy to release SocialAds 3.1.15 which is primarily a bug fix release along with some security fixes.

Buy SocialAds

Read on for the detailed changelog.

I recently happened to have a client approach us to build a mobile app. What should have been a fairly quick job turned out into a mid sized development project. The reason ? They had created almost half a dozen custom components where articles could have served the purpose.

Another project was a government site serving almost 50 million hits a month. This too has something which I’d call a “blatant misuse of Joomla”. More than half a dozen extensions created for a myriad of things - PDFs, audio files, videos. Articles would have been sufficient here too.

This prompted to share some rules that I realised we had been following for a long time, but never got documented. So here’s our unwritten rulebook on building Joomla sites

We have released Shika 1.3.11 today which is a maintenance release and comes with some bug fixes. We recommend that you read the release notes before upgrading to the latest version. Read on for the detailed changelog.

We are happy that we have yet another feature packed Shika release getting released today! Key highlights are - Support for Large Exams, Safe Exam Browser integration & a new “integrations” plugin structure that allows plugins to define course level configuration.

Ability to add a user to a Joomla user group and adding a user to an Easysocial group are core integrations that use the new feature. Another interesting feature is an option to separate buying and enrollment, so users can buy a course but start the subscription at a later date.

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As we go on in our pursuit to use Joomla in never-seen-before use cases a few interesting problems came forth.

• A web-hooks implementation: Similar to how plugins can declare triggers they want to listen to, webhooks allow external applications to register URLs that can receive a JSON payload when an action happens in an application. Since there could be multiple webhooks, each webhook call is queued as a message and happens asynchronously.
• In Shika: Recalculating user progress in the background. When a new lesson is added to a course, Shika recalculates each enrolled user’s progress to take into account the newly added lesson. When there are a lot of lessons and a large number of users enrolled in the course, this recalculation cannot happen in real time. In this case, a recalculation job does this in the background once the lesson is saved.

In the past few months, we have made lots of 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.

With Shika 1.3.9, we have released a security update for Shika. In some configuration combinations, guests can get access to lessons in paid courses. We have fixed this issue in version 1.3.9. We recommend you upgrade to this release immediately. 

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Teens is that time between being a child and an adult when you start experiencing freedom & start liking the taste of it. It's that time when you slowly start taking the controls of your life into your own hands. It is like the first time you drive a car on a learner’s license with an adult riding shotgun. It's that time when your parents slowly start transitioning to being ‘guardians’ and helping you take control.

Depending on the nature of the business and the experience of its leaders, companies will most likely go through similar phases. When the company is just getting started, it needs careful nurturing & constant care from its leaders.

As it grows more people are added to the team, a culture starts to form and systems are put in place to allow the company to function in some areas ‘on its own’. This independence will free its leadership to start nurturing various aspects of the company to help it grow bigger and better in its areas of focus. It is a time to dream, experiment and go after aspirations with a passion and hunger. It is a time to explore, a time to build on the experience and guidance and grow.

As Tekdi turns 13, it is a time for us to reflect and a time to look forward.

SocialAds 3.1.14

The latest version of our Joomla advertising solution, SocialAds is now available and all our customers are requested to immediately upgrade to the new version. We have fixed plenty of bugs in SocialAds v3.1.14.

Buy SocialAds

Please read the release notes carefully before upgrading to the latest version. Read on for the detailed changelog.

We are happy to release Shika 1.3.8. With Shika 1.3.8, course creators can render course’s custom fields on the certificate. During the assessment, Assessors can also preview files uploaded for file upload question type for exercise and quiz. Google Viewer and  Microsoft viewer are currently supported.

Besides this, we have also released some features in alpha to manage some dependencies and fixed a few bugs.

Read on for the detailed changelog.

Techjoomla is pleased to announce our new partnership with JoomlaShine to bring JTicketing users a beautiful treat! JSN Festival, their latest offering brings a stunning new user interface for JTicketing. This template is a perfect fit for any ticketing system.

We had been working with our customer Osians, to build a knowledge base site for the years of archival work they had been doing documenting over 200 years of contemporary Indian culture. The catalog currently boasts of over 125,000 records documented with details.

We are happy to release Shika 1.3.7 which introduces character count configuration for text area type questions and also lets you set specific file size for file upload type for questions in Shika. We have also fixed a couple of bugs in this release.

Buy Shika Now!

We recommend that you read the release notes before upgrading to the latest version. Read on for details related to the new feature and for the detailed changelog.

Mistake 2: Forgetting to unset the reference variable after the loop.

In the previous blog of the series we started with the isset function mistake and I have promised to post about the next mistake which is leaving dangling array references after foreach loop.

While working with arrays, we need foreach to iterate over arrays. In some case, we might be just displaying each array element while iterations but in some case, we might need to manipulate or operate on each element. When there is a case, where we need to operate on each element, using references in foreach loops can be useful. See below code snippet.