A few years ago, we realised that even though Joomla was a businesses system, allowing business to advertise, market and trade online, it actually had very few business tools. Yes, you could add forms, invoice systems, ecommerce, etc, but few of these are integrated into each other, creating duplicate content and no synchronisation of data and almost no standardised branding. They don't integrate into systems outside of Joomla, such as how do you get the customer/orders from Virtuemart into your accounts, or if you have a stock control system in your shop, how do you get VirtueMart to communicate with it and let it know a stock item has been sold?

So we started to develop a suite of tools, which allows expansion and true business help.

We want to "Bring the big guys tools, to the small guys".

Structure

We structured the suite in a similar way to how Apple and Android operating systems work. In those, all programs/Apps, uses central repositories of data, so the contacts app, stores and provides any other program on the computer/phone that needs names, addresses, emails, telephone numbers , etc. This means if a contact changes a detail like their email or address, it is changed in one place, and it updates everywhere in the system.

Contact Component

So we have built a contact system, which has a set of fields for storing the data against each user. New fields can be added if needed, so developers can add new fields to this component as their component is installed so all the data they need can be stored against the user. So for example in the below finance component, their VAT number, company ID etc can be stored, and then used again if needed by any other component.

Finance Component

The first major component we have built is the Joomla Finance, a Joomla extension which records and processes accounting transactions.

The system is designed to integrate into other existing and future Joomla extensions including an included VirtueMart plugin, using a well documented API for developers.

The finance component is a fully featured book keeping component which allows you to run your business accounts, home book keeping, or personal finances with the below features.

• Invoice's
• Receipts
• Customers
• Supplier's
• Reports
• VirtueMart Sync plugin
• Front end payment gateway system

API

Developers can use this finance component (and future components) to integrate into their components and use the front end payment gateway system to take payments. This means the developer wont need to create a checkout, invoice and payment gateway system, as this will do it all for them. This will hugely speed up component development time, make sure everything in the site has the same branding, concurrent invoice numbers of all components taking payments, and even allow multiple sites to be linked together and synchronised.

Cost and Licence

We will release it for the general public as GPL open source and free of cost. We want it to be open, friendly and used by the community, so we wont be holding it back with a cost which will limit developers take up. Adding a financial cost will limit developers using it.

Included Payment Gateways

The system will be launched with PayPal and Google Checkout payment gateways.

So how do we make money and pay for development?

Of course we have mortgages, pizzas and beer to buy, so we must make money. We will be releasing the core system for free forever, and will never charge for it. It will be fully functional and not limited. But we will release some luxury features over time, that we will charge a small fee for. This will be things such as extra payment gateways, reports, and larger sub extensions that will give it industry specific features.

Can accountants use this?

Yes, we have an export system built in which exports a CSV file, that can be imported into Sage Accounting, that is used by a huge number of accountants. We will be producing many more exporting tools, to try and cover as many types of accounting software as practically possible.

Does it calculate TAX?

The first release will not calculate tax, we want to make sure we have the core system bug and flaw free, before starting to move onto the tax system. But we will for sure be releasing an update very soon that will calculate Tax in most countries around the world.

Will it be international and multi language

Yes, we are based in the UK, but we want this to be used by everybody, not just english speaking people. If you can help us with translation and bringing it to people around the world, please contact us.

So whats next?

Well of course, we cant release for commercial reasons what we are doing at the moment, but trust us, we have a detailed 36 month time plan, and the plans are incredible. We have consulted with many of the main extension developers and made sure we work with them, rather than against them. We have no interest in causing issues for other developers, in fact we want to make their components far more successful. For example working with shopping carts such as VirtueMart, gives them a far greater set of features that will attract many more users, maybe even convince uses to move from other CMS systems into Joomla.

Moving from Windows 7 to 100% Mac OS X Lion

Before I start, I'm NOT a Mac lover, and will not say Mac is perfect as it is not. This is just my opinions on the 2 systems and what I see as the pro and cons of each after working with both for over a decade on each.
Below is my experiences and how I found working with the 2 systems extensively, and the are the problems I have had personally had.

My computer left on idle is equally as damaging as driving 10,700 miles in a 40mpg car!

I have just had a conversation with a friend that dropped into the conversation they dropped that they had not restarted their PC in over a month, as they leave it running so they dont have to open all the applications and documents again each time they sit down.

What am I using?
So that got me thinking, what effect has that really got on the environment, or is it almost nothing. I own a watt meter, that I plug into the wall between the extension that my PC, printer, Scanner, 2 monitors and all the other parts run from such as Broadband Router, USB Hubs, and speakers. It showed even when the computer has basic software open and not doing any work basically on idle, the whole lot is consuming 520 watts per hour.

I thought I am sat here on average 10hrs per work day and about 5hrs per weekend day, which comes to 60 hrs... but there are 168hrs in a week, so if my computer setup was left on all the time, it would be on for 108hrs per week when not needed.

The maths
So I found a website
http://www.infinitepower.org/calc_carbon.htm
Which calculates the CO2 output from that. I have assumed I am Using a western coal fired station, as it is more than likely living in the North East of England I am.

So 520 watts x 108hrs + 56,160 watts per week / 7 = 8.022KWh per day average. This is 2928 KWh per year!

Carbon Effect
So this means according to that website, I am creating 19,165 pounds of CO2 per year.

To compare that against something we all know, if you were driving a 40mpg car, you would need to drive 10,700 miles to cause the same damage to the environment!

Financial Cost

My electricity provider charges 16p per kWh for the first 728kWh and 13p per unit after, so I have guesstimated 15p per unit for this.

http://www.ukpower.co.uk/tools/running_costs_electricity/
This works out that 520 watt item for 462 hrs per month = £36 per month.

Conclusion

So if you were to spend the £36 you saved by turning your computer off on diesel for your car at £1.34.9 per litre (as it is today - 28th Feb 2011), you could drive 235 miles in your 40mpg car.

This would create 423 pounds of CO2.

Or the computer would create 1597 pounds in the same month for the same money, which makes the car almost 4 times more efficient!!!!

Joomla day 2010 was held in Ipswich this year and our new project www.JoomlaSiteMonitor.com was the main event sponsor. During this event, we launched JSM after spending almost a full year building it. Please visit the site to see for yourself the features and tools that even the president of Joomla was impressed with.

www.JoomlaSiteMonitor.com

I have been looking for a newer car, and was wondering what the difference in costs really are regarding the MPG and if it was worth me worrying about it.

The car I have now does 24mpg, and the new one I'm looking at does 39mpg, so I calculated I will save over £1000 per year (@ £1.16 per litre, and 12,000 miles per year).

Please download the (virus scanned) excel sheet for free from here

(It was made on Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, but will open fine in the PC version as well.)

Google has finally launched its own property search engine on its Google Maps service in the UK. Google has already been using US and Australia as a testing ground for its new free real estate service, which has changed the dynamics of the property market in those countries.

The new feature helps you find available properties and explore neighbourhoods on a single map.

We anticipated this 3yrs ago and started developing components ready for it, and here it is.

www.googlebaseproperty.com

I have just made a simple website for my mum who knits and sells jumpers and hats (bless her lol), and she was struggling to do the basic things on her site, so i made this simple admin module for her.

http://www.sugarpolo.co.uk

All it does is display on the home page of her administration system quick links to the manual and demo plaza videos.

http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=71144.0

I have posted info here as well

I was sent an email asking for advice on how to best to photograph and use lighting to show clothing, in particular waterproof clothing for a website, and this is the reply I gave them.

Hmm this is a difficult one, as it is very much personal preference and the type of shot your trying to get, for example lighting wedding dresses, gothic clothes, a pair of doc martins and a builders over alls will all be done in a different way, but none will be the right or wrong way... It’s just the way that fits the job spec.

But.... in general, it is 99% about sex appeal, the doc martins are a trend for a certain market and if somebody like Kate Moss was to wear a pair on your images you would sell many more than if you were to use some swamp monster that the general person would not find attractive. Same as the builders overalls, people would rather look at some handsome chisel chinned bloke wearing them getting out of a clean professional van with new equipment, rather than a fat bloke on a dirty muddy raining day with some tatty 1986 transit van in the background.

I have wrote many times on the VirtueMart forums, on how to remove/hide the VirtueMart logo fro the Virtuemart Cart Module, but thought I would add it in here as well.

I went to McDonald's Ryhope (Sunderland UK) last night and paid £2.99 with a £5 note for a Chicken Legend Burger... They had cashed up for the night so she was running to the back of the shop to get my change and gave me it.

I asked if I could upgrade to a meal, and she said “if you know how much extra then yes as I can’t work that out without my calculator.”

So I said OK I'll pay the extra, could I top it up to a £4.59 meal please.... she said I will have to refund you first as there is no option on the till to add to it in, so she went to the back of the shop and came back with my £2.99 but I had got my £1.60 extra ready whilst she was at the back and gave it to her when she returned.

She stood and looked at me and said you take your £2.99 back and pay me it all again... so I said look you have the right money now in your hand, £4.59, so she went back to the back of the shop and came back with 41p change?? I said what this is for; she said you gave me a £5 note at the beginning, so this is your change from that. I replied you have already given me that change in the first transaction so she through it in the charity box and said if you don’t want it I’ll give it to charity!!!!

And she was the manageress lol!!!

One of the largest problems with VirtueMart is the huge amounts of spam that comes through the "Ask a question about this product" form linked on the product flypage (product details). There are no spam controls or filters of any form, so you get the lot.

I have found many people on forums looking for ways to add a hack to the standard Joomla system, to display the article titles as H1 (Header 1) in the source code, without hacking the core system.

Last week on Wednesday i was asked by Nexus productions, the producers of the Honda animated adverts, to come down to London and setup a full working bullet time rig in the main foyer of The Tait Britain.

The most comon question i am asked by my clients, is whats the Best/Cheapest Payment Gateway to use!!!

Well for those who are a little confused to what a payment gateway is, it works like this

One of the components we are building for our Joomla 1.5 Google Based Project, is "Google Base Vehicles".

This is a full system that allows a Joomla site to be converted into a Vehicle system. Allowing Vehicle sellers of all types to advertise their Vehicles on their own site, which will automatically upload to Google via FTP, to be shown on the worlds largest Vehicle Portal for free.

One of the components we are building for our Joomla 1.5 Google Base Proejct, is "Google Base Property".

This is a full system that allows a Joomla site to be converted into a property system. Allowing property agencts of all types to advertise their properties on thier own site, which will automatically upload to Google via FTP, to be shown on the worlds largest Property Portal for free.

Today we started a whole new project
www.JoomlaGoogleBase.com

This will be the development of many component that fit into Joomla, allowing the system to be changed into almost anything you want and upload the results to Google Base.

More will be posted as i we move through this project.

Regards

Ian

I suppose you could call this round 2 - ding ding

We have returned back to the studio in London to take more images for Rodnik, but taking what we learnt in the first attempt on board and using constant lighting.

We built a huge 24 foot cylinder of poly boards 8ft high ot use as backgrounds and to increase the amount of ambiant light, as constant lighting isnt anywhere near as good as studio lights.

You can see the results here
http://www.bullettimephotography.com/temp/lily/
We only used 8 cameras here as we knew it was an experiment and would be more of a trial and error than science. But we were all very pleased with the results, but as we were about to take another set, one of the support crew fell into the cylinder and knocked it over....

http://www.bullettimephotography.com/temp/lily/enamulflying.html
Thats us messing around whilst we were waiting for Lily to get chnaged for the next shoot. See nothing but serious work

We have been commissioned to produce an online interactive video with the incredible www.enamul.co.uk fashion photographer for the launch of Rodnik Clothing (winner of London Fashion Show 2008).

Whilst Enamel produced an incredible video of the launch, i was commissioned to take Object VR photography of the New York Elite model Shaina Danziger, which you can see the results of here

http://www.bullettimephotography.com/temp/shaina/

We found as this was an experiment in its own right, that the lighting was incorrect, as the shutter speed was faster than the lighting. So some of the cameras were triggering after or before the lights were triggering, making dark images.

So the next time we will be using constant lighting to over come this problem.

I will update here when the video and virtual tours are finished :)

• “Is there any way to stop spam”
• “Can we stop emails from the fake banks”

• “my bank keeps sending me emails but it’s a dead link”

Over the past few months we have been researching and building a Bullet Time Photography rig, which allows photography similar to that of "The Matrix Movie". This was mainly produced for the fashion industry, but we have been testing it with many other industries to try and what affects we can acheive

The Rig consists of 100 Digital SLR cameras, which are all fired at the precise same time, which gives an accuracy of about one billionth of a second.

You can see a video of us setting this up in a clients venue a few days ago below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY60EtLmCTQ

The long awaited Joomla Froogle Feed V4 was released today, allowing much more control over the Version 3.

New Features include

- Auto FTP upload to Google

- With or Without Tax

- Condition New or Used

- Custom Categories

- Period of time between FTP uploads

The Froogle Feed is a system that allows you to upload all products for free from your Virtuemart Shopping store onto Google Base, the worlds largest Price comparison site.

Google Base RSS Feeder
Click the above title to view out micro site about it.

We have spent the past three months producing an RSS Feeder for the ecommerce package called VirtueMart.

Allowing you to export all the products straight into Froogle (or Google base as its now known). Only 2 days after being released it was reviewed by the very respected Alledia Joomla review site who said

"I'm very careful about recommending products on this blog, plugging only about 10% of the stuff that gets sent........

Its simple to set up and the demonstration video gives you a good idea of what it can do.

So, no affiliate links, no paid posting, just a recommendation. Its a good product."
Please read the rest of the review here

What else can i say, just look at the review

www.isleofwightcheese.co.uk - Website Launch

To produce The Isle of Wight Cheese Companies website we worked together with the children's book illustrator Caroline Davis, who designed this very user friendly website.

We needed it to be user friendly, very fun, and not corporate at all.

The Isle of Wight Cheese Company was set up by Richard Hodgson, who after only 3 months of trading won Gold Prize for the the best English Cheese in the World Cheese Awards.

Shortly afterwards, he then had a 10 min slot on the BBC's Working Lunch program, showing his company and his achievements. You can see the video of the show on the website.

The website is built using

• Our Full CMS System, allowing the client to update the website 24/7 from their own PC (or Mac of course)
  
  
• 2 Custom Templates, allowing our client to decide for himself how he wants the site to look on any page.
  
  
• Multiple Module positions, allowing any part of the site to be moved around and positioned anywhere else on the screen.
  
  
• A full event calendar, so he can show where he will be and showing of his Cheese.

I have great pride of working with a company who's heart and sole is sank into the quality of the products they supply, and I hope we have reflected this in the website we have produced.

We have just launched one of the most intense websites we have ever built. Nutriculture are one of Europe's largest and most established hydroponics suppliers, providing service and outlets to nearly every country in Western and Eastern Europe. They approached us after finding us through many different forums and other websites, as they knew we had the ability to produce exactly what they required with Joomla.

www.nutriculture.com
This site was produced using

• XHTML and CSS Table-less custom design
• The Joomla CMS System
• VirtueMart shopping eCommerce system
• Search Engine Friendly Optimized URLs
• Completely controllable tabs through the admin system
• 9 module positions, allowing the client to add content to 9 different places on the page
• Random generator, which shows one of over 50 different header images each time the page is loaded
• A custom form setup, allowing multiple contact pages and support query forms
• A full Gallery system
• over 500 pages of content showing their clients how to use their products.
• Integration into their last website
• HTML Map location system
• Hosting and email configuration

Don't be fooled into thinking that because we have used an out of the box CMS system called Joomla, that this was an easy project, this site took over 6 weeks of full time work, to customize the system to be exactly how the client wanted.

Even the shopping system has been hacked to allow it to work exactly how the client requested, showing and displaying products as they have asked within the detailed brief.

At last we have built a page advertising our Joomla SEO services.

Please take a look here and see if you could use us to your advantage.

http://www.newworlddesigns.co.uk/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88&Itemid=95

Hosting Services
As of now we officially provide a hosting service. Up till present we have been providing Hosting for all the freelancers and staff which work for us, as well as about a hundred clients. But over the New Year, we invested in a new bank of servers which provides our hosting, as well as massively more than we require. This now allows us to provide a hosting service to clients wishing to only have fully managed web space.