Archive for January, 2010
We’ve said it before: one of the aspects that can make software truly shine, is great support. Finding better ways to give our users the support they deserve, has been one of our priorities for 2010. So far that’s been going swimmingly:
Today we are taking the third step in our quest to serve you better: We’re launching a shiny new support site for DOCman! Go and take a look at http://support.joomlatools.eu.
(And yes, the trained eye will notice the sweet looking CSS3 effects that our designer Tom put in there. If you’re still using an old browser, upgrade to Firefox 3.6 or Chrome now for full bliss.)
Sometimes a simple diagram says it better than a thousand words:
Update: This picture triggered a little game on Twitter. People are making their own versions of ‘How people see Joomla’. Wanna play? Send your picture to @mathiasverraes or post in the comments.
The creations so far:
Today we released the latest update of DOCman 1.5 to our customers. These are some of the most important changes:
As usual, users who bought v1.5.x get free updates. To get you own copy, head over to the Joomlatools Store.
UPDATE: When upgrading, make sure you are using the special upgrade package called upgrade_docman_v1.5.x_to_v1.5.2.r1147.tar.gz, and not the normal package called docman_v1.5.2.r1147.tar.gz. Download links for both packages are in the email that is sent to all customers.
I’m very happy to announce that in the coming days, we are also releasing the DOCman Productivity Pack. This contains three must-have add-ons to DOCman that can really boost your workflow:
More on the DOCman Productivity pack later!
Occasionally we receive questions from people asking why they should use DOCman instead of another document management or download extension for Joomla. We haven’t done any feature-by-feature comparisons — we’ll leave that to other bloggers — but below is a re-post of what I answered to a question on our forum.
On the Joomla Extensions Directory, every category has 5 or 10 alternatives you can choose from. That’s a benefit, but it can also make things more difficult. How to pick the right one? For me, it’s always about flexibility, security, and support.
Long before I started Joomlatools with Johan, I was building websites for customers. Remository and DOCman were the only choices back then. My customers asked for features that neither provided. But I looked at the code, and even though I was a pretty inexperienced developer back then, DOCman’s code made sense. It wasn’t long before I started making addons for DOCman to satisfy my customer’s requirements. Some of those addons are still around: Autopopulate, AutoThumb… When I later became lead developer, adding even more ways to extend DOCman has always been my priority over adding features. Adding a feature is like giving someone a fish, adding flexibility is giving them a fishing pole.
When open source software is used by many people, bugs and vulnerabilities get discovered more rapidly (Linus’ Law). Despite the fact that DOCman is one of the most popular extensions for Joomla (and has been for years), it’s been a very long time since any noteworthy vulnerability was discovered. Building a Joomla extension is easy. Building one that can resist hacking attempts is something that requires your full attention.
Finally, yes we started charging for DOCman recently. We realize that even though the price is only that of a lunch and a coffee, it might cause many people to switch to other solutions. But you get a lot for this money: We can now focus on DOCman, instead of always pushing it to the bottom of the todo list. You can see it in the speed and quality of replies to support questions in the forum: in fact we hired Krisstoffer, who used to be a voluntarily moderator on our forum, so we are now paying him to help people. You can also see it in the development: we released the 1.5.1 update only a week after releasing 1.5.0, whereas before, releases took us 6 months or more.
(Update: We just added a brand new support portal to serve DOCman users even better!)
In the end you have to decide for yourself what suits you. With it’s ACL’s, nested categories, theming etc, DOCman is very feature-rich choice, for a very competitive price. But be aware that features and price are not the only things that can make software great.
Last week, two security reports caught our attention. Even though they are not directly about any of our products, they are relevant to our users. That is why we have opened a new forum to announce vulnerabilities. Please subscribe to the Joomlatools security RSS feed, or to the security forum (you need a forum account).
This extension allows you to sell documents through DOCman. So far the developer of this extension has not responded to this vulnerability report. As the extension’s web page doesn’t show any activity, we suspect it has been abandoned.
If you are using this extension, we advise you to uninstall it completely, until an update is released. The AEC extension might be a good alternative.
UPDATE: The entry on the extensions directory states that the component was updated to v2.2. However, the download link is broken, I couldn’t find any information on Ossolution’s site, and the site’s support page appears to have been hacked.
UPDATE 2: In the meantime the links on the JED have been updated to point to Ossolution’s new site. However, in the meantime Ossolution claims to have made a completely new version 2.5 of the extension, which no longer depends on DOCman. They refused to send us a copy, so we have no idea at all how secure it is.
We have investigated this report, and it does not concern the Joomla:Alfresco integration that was published through Joomlatools Labs over a year ago. We have been unable to find the developer of this extension, so we believe it might be a custom extension that is not available on the JED. If you have more information, please let us know.
If you have an Alfresco extension installed, you can identify it by opening /administrator/components/com_alfresco/manifest.xml. If it starts with the following header, you are using our secure extension. If it doesn’t, you might be using the vulnerable extension.
<name>Alfresco</name> <author>Joomlatools</author> <copyright>Copyright (C) 2008 Joomlatools. All rights reserved.</copyright> <creationdate>December 2008</creationdate> <license>http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html GNU/GPL</license> <authoremail>info@joomlatools.org</authoremail> <authorurl>www.joomlatools.org</authorurl> <version>1.0.0</version> <description>This component displays an Alfresco repository using CMIS</description>
