We are happy to announce the release of our new image slideshow module for Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5, Mod Panelsider. This module displays your images in an attractive and unusual scrolling javascript slideshow. The display consists of a main image with previews of the previous and next images in two semi-opaque side panels.

This is our first extension release designed specifically for Joomla 2.5: we wanted to take advantage of some of the advanced features only possible with Joomla 2.5.

The module comes in 3 versions: the basic version which requires no external extensions, a version for Ignite Gallery, and a version for FW Gallery.

Self-Replicating Form Field for Joomla

There are times as a Joomla extension developer when it would be very useful to have a form field in Joomla that is capable of self-replication. For example, you want your user to be able to input some links, but you don't know in advance how many there will be, you want your user to be able to choose to add as many as they want without imposing any arbitrary limit. What you want is a self-replication form field that can return its values as an array.

Well now you can have one. We have designed a system of self-replicating form fields for Joomla extensions. The variable field form field can be used to generate self-replicating fields of most of the Joomla standard field types, including text, textarea, list and other list based types, such as category or usergroup. The user will see the standard input field, plus buttons which allow the user to add or delete input fields, also to re-order them, also to re-order them up and down.

You can see a couple of simple examples, for the text and list fields, here.

Best of all, you can download it for free here.

We have a new release of our Imgen component, our image generator for Joomla. The latest release is version 1.1.1.

This component for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 allows you to dynamically resize and compress your site images. It includes a plugin framework, and is available with plugins to add a watermark, and to apply dynamic resizing to all your article images, and to restrict image viewing to particular user groups. The component can cache the resized images, and also allows you to encode the image path, which is useful if you want to hide the location of your original image files.

Version 1.1.1

The new release improves the handling of transparent PNG images. There are new versions of both the main component and the watermark plugin. If you update to these you should find that PNG images are now handled correctly. There are also some small improvements to the image resizer plugin - it should now correctly pick up image style and alignment information.

We have a new release of our Imgen component, our image generator for Joomla. The latest release is version 1.1.0.

This component for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 allows you to dynamically resize and compress your site images. It includes a plugin framework, and is available with plugins to add a watermark, and to apply dynamic resizing to all your article images, and to restrict image viewing to particular user groups. The component can cache the resized images, and also allows you to encode the image path, which is useful if you want to hide the location of your original image files.

Version 1.1.0

The new release includes features to improve usability. It deals with a problem with displaying images with spaces in the file name, and can avoid problems with caching caused by image name duplication which affected the previous version.

There are also new releases of the watermark plugin (version 1.1.0), and the image resizer (1.0.3). The new release of the watermark plugin includes more options for positioning the watermark, while the new image resizer allows resizing to be turned off for particular Joomla layouts. For example you can now have blog article images resized, but have the original article image left untouched.

There is also a new plugin, ImageRestrict, which allows you to restrict the view of images on your site to your chosen user groups.