Amazon WS, our popular Joomla extension for Amazon Associates, is now also available for Wordpress.

The plugin for the popular Wordpress blogging system allows you to easily embed Amazon product information in your blog. Once you have installed the plugin you will be able to add products simply by setting tags for your article. The plugin will use these to run a keyword search of the Amazon database and automatically output the results, making it very simple to use.

You can find out more and buy the plugin here.

Paypal are currently running a prize draw for all customers paying with Paypal. They'll be drawing five winners every day between 25 October and 20 December 2011.

PayPal is the safer, simpler, smarter way to pay online. All you need is an email address to make secure online payments using your debit card, credit card, bank account or PayPal balance. You can shop knowing that PayPal doesn’t share your financial details with sellers and that your money and information stay safer with PayPal’s industry leading fraud protection tools. It’s also a convenient way to pay - no more waiting for cheques to clear or hassles with postal orders. Sign up for a PayPal account and you could start to shop at hundreds of UK websites within minutes.

Version 2 of Com GooglebaseXML, our component for Joomla 1.5 and Virtuemart 1.1x is now released.

This component allows you to create an XML product feed for your Virtuemart store for upload to Google Merchant Centre. The latest release includes several new features designed to give you a more accurate and informative product feed. These include:-

• Product variant display
• Support for additional product attributes such as size, color etc
• Support for the Google Category attribute
• Additional countries, those supported are now: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, China, Australia, Brazil and Switzerland
• Support for sale_price, and sale price effective date attributes
• Additional product images
• Feed can use Virtuemart product type data fields

Version 2 is designed to be much more flexible about the product information that can be displayed. An entirely new feature is the use of Virtuemart product type information, which can be incorporated into the data feed to allow you to customize the data sent to Google for each product.

Version 1 of Com GooglebaseXML was one of our most popular products, we hope this new version will be even more popular with customers, as our aim is to make it a highly effective tool for submitting your products to Google product data search.

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This month's featured extension is the module for Joomla! 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7, mod NewsTab.

This module allows you to display links to your Joomla news articles in a series of tabs, a format popular with many news websites. A simple application module would be to display 'latest', 'popular' and 'featured' articles using three tabs. However this module is extremely flexible, and is capable of far more than that. You can display up to 8 tabs

The module supports articles both from the Joomla core content component and from Mighty Extensions Resources, also the K2 content component.

View an example

The long awaited new release of Com Jigsaw, our Flash puzzle game for Joomla, is now available. This component allows you to turn your site images into a jigsaw puzzle, and is great fun for adults and children. It will load images from any site folder you specify, and automatically turn them into a puzzle.

Version 3 includes some great new features:-

• The layout is completely flexible, it can be resized to any dimensions required, to fit into any site;
• unlimited images can be displayed;
• the puzzle now includes a timer, user time scores are now uploaded to a database table and displayed;
• social sharing buttons encourage users to advertise your site by posting the puzzle to their Twitter and Facebook accounts

You can buy the game here.

We are pleased to announce updated release of our Flash extensions for Joomla 1.5,  1.6 and 1.7, modules Featured Items Flash, and Featured Items Flash 3D. These modules display images from your Joomla articles as Flash slideshows, with clickable links to the articles - a great way to enliven your Joomla site.

Unlike many Flash extensions, these are fully integrated into the Joomla content management system, so there is no messing about with XML data files, you just choose the articles to display in the module administration. The modules will automatically detect the article images and display them in the slideshow gallery. As well as being compatible with the Joomla core content component, these modules support Mighty Extensions Resources, and the K2 content component. They can integrate with social components such as Community Builder, Mighty Touch and JomSocial, to show images from articles by the currently profiled user.

The latest release of the modules adds support for displaying multiple images per article and improves the quality of the image display.

The  latest release of our Amazon Web Services content plugin for Joomla 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7, and for Mighty Extensions Resources, is version 2.4.2. This content plugin allows you to embed product information and reviews and links from Amazon Web Services into your Joomla articles. 

This release includes several improvements:-

• It adds support for Joomla 1.7
• It adds support for the latest version of the Amazon product advertising API (2011-08-01)
• It adds support for the new Italian and Chinese Amazon product advertising APIs (see https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1115)

We have a new release of our slideshow module for Joomla, mod Featured Items Slideshow. This module can display images from your Joomla! articles as a slideshow, with a caption taken from the text, and a link to the articles. The module finds your article images automatically, the administrator just needs to pick the section or category, or the individual articles.

Version 2 includes a completely new HTML 5 layout, supporting a variety of image transition effects.

The latest release also includes several other improvements:

• the controller display is now optional
• the slideshow speed is now optional
• multiple images can be displayed from each article
• improved image resizing now allows you to specify the exact width and height of each image displayed.

Are you using one of our extensions on your site? Would you like to show it off?

We are planning a new section of our site features links to live sites that use our extensions. If you would like your site to be featured just send as an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , with the name of your site, a short description of your site, the name of the extension and a link to a URL where the extension can be seen in action.

Joomla is the world's most popular system for building and managing websites. It is an example of a 'content management system' - often abbreviated to CMS. This article discussess some of the reasons for Joomla's popularity.

Why Use a CMS?

In the early days of the web, most websites consisted of static html pages. The site content of a typical website seldom changed, and when it did, it was neccessary to edit the actual page html code, requiring at least a basic level of expertise. However, for all but the most simple of websites, these days this is not a practical way to manage a website. Individuals and businesses want the freedom to be able to manage their site content without having to learn coding: the solution is a CMS.

For large businesses the preferred choice is always likely to be a custom CMS. However creating a custom CMS can be a complex, time and resource consuming process, requiring extensive programing, and will typically cost many thousands of pounds, making it an unrealistic option for small and even medium-sized businesses. Fortunately there are many 'off-the-shelf' content management systems available, the most popular of which is Joomla.