JCal Pro MVC for Joomla 1.5 took a big step forward in the last few days as we released version 1.5.9 (build 383 and then build 384).

Together, these back-to-back releases contain fixes for what appear to be the last major bugs in the new Joomla 1.5-native codebase. These bugs deal with time zone managment for event display on the calendar as well as event submission/edition/deletion permissions on non-english sites as well as english-only sites running on PHP4.

While these issues are not security related, we recommend that all users upgrade to the most recent build. We are hoping to squash any  remaining bugs in the next few weeks so the codebase can be stabilized.

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As Joomla 1.5 continues to add new features and bug fixes to the codebase, it gets closer and closer to becoming a true, enterprise-class content management system. However, there are still some features absent from the core functionality which limit the widespread adoption of Joomla in large-scale, mission-critical environments. Perhaps the most obvious of these ‘killer features' are customizable access controls (i.e. advanced user/usergroup permissioning), nested content categories, customizable user registration and revision control. The latter is the management of multiple revisions or ‘versions' of the same unit of information. In colaborative environments, revision control is a mustr but even for the lone editor or content provider, revision control provides a very convenient content back-up solution for those times when you accidentally delete a few hours of writing. 

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As a software developer, one way in which we promote our products if through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketting is esentially a link exchange program where the people who post links to your products (on their web sites or in their blogs, newsletters, etc...) get a commission of the sales generated from those links. In fact, you'll notice some of our own affiliate links on the left-hand side of this page under "Recommended Vendors". Of course, a software package tracks the affiliate traffic and a very popular version is called iDevAffiliate.

While recently configuring and testing iDevAffiliate for this web site (details coming soon), we noticed something peculiar. When an affiliate signs up for an account, they must provide a username and password and often tax information such as a SSN (USA) or VAT (Europe). In the case of iDevAffiliate, this sensitive password and tax information was being saved in plain text format. Although this is not an inherent security risk, it does increase vendor liability dramatically should a database be compromised and the affilaite details stolen.

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It is my duty to announce that JCal Pro v1.6.x has been officially deprecated. This Joomla! 1.0/1.5 hybrid was simply too unweildly and overly complicated, especially as we poured more-and-more resources into JCal Pro 1.5.x MVC. However, we are committed to re-engineering many of the features in JCal Pro 1.6 into JCal Pro 1.5.x MVC for Joomla! 1.5.x. Our first priority will be to improve recurring event options and add recurring event exceptions.

In our ongoing efforts to make the forum more intuitive and easy to use, we have recently completed a major reshuffling of the Forums. The most striking difference is that a number of JCal Pro boards have been locked and archived. All active threads for JCal Pro are now restricted to 2 tracks: Joomla 1.0! and Joomla! 1.5.

We get many enquiries regarding how to stay up-to-date with JCal Pro and our other extensions at dev.Anything-Digital.com. Besides this newsletter, we recommend subscribing to a board on the Forum. To subscribe for board notifications, simply select a board on the forum such as the Announcements board and click the ‘Notify’ button at the top-right of the board index.