On jinsiders.de, a German Joomla! blog, our friend René interviewed the chief developer of the new Ninjaboard, Stian Didrikson. Yesterday, after a Skype session with Stian, he and I decided to publish this interview here in English as well since Google Translate does not seem to do as good a job as it's supposed to ;-)

As to the personal data, Stian is 20 years old and lives in Stavanger/Norway. He is currently a developer at Ninjaforge and Prothemer and he and his team distinguish themselves by the development of Ninjaboard version 1.0 that is to appear soon in a stable version. This promises to be interesting.

What do you think, when will the Ninjaboard be available as final version?
We have a milestone set for this month.

Meanwhile, the Beta 3 of NB was published. But the month is almost over, so where is the expected milestone? Any unexpected problems?
Yeah, the upgrade to a very powerful new feature in the Nooku Framework (called KConfig, a new API that is similar to the Options API in MooTools) was more work to upgrade to than expected.

We've also reevaluated our 1.0 feature list, and looked at the remaining workload. So we have changed our plans, RC will be out instead of the stable, and RC will come about a week after Beta4 which is coming this week.

So we're more or less delayed by 2 weeks.

How many people work on the Ninjaboard?
It's me, Stephanie Schmidt, Richie Mortimer, Uwe Walter and Mark Simpson.

You would like to run a shop with Joomla! and Virtuemart and are looking for a Virtuemart Theme or Virtuemart Template to optically add value to your Virtuemart shop? In that case, you should consider in advance what you would like to achieve with your shop. Do you want to run a Joomla! eCommerce shop just for fun? No, of course not.

You want to make money. Consequently, you should at first contemplate how you can stand apart from your competitors... How you can make your customers' visit to your shop as convenient as possible - until they ideally buy something. Would you shop in a store that looks just like all the others? I wouldn't...

Will an online shop created sloppily with the standard Virtuemart theme or a free Virtuemart theme used by innumerable people gain the trust of your potential customers? This is a question you should ask yourself as a Joomla eCommerce shop owner. If you see things with the eyes of your potential customers, you will definetly answer this question with "no".

It's been exactly a fortnight ago that we released the last update of our Virtuemart Theme VaMazing, which mainly solved bugs you had reported. Today, we released version 1.3.0. that contains 2 improvements you asked for.

Firstly, it is now possibly to deactivate the Image Zoom in the Product List View via parameters in the backend. Secondly, and on repeated request, we have integrated a query that checks whether categories contain any products at all. Consequently, if the respective category only contains subcategories but no products, an output of the empty categories will be disabled.

In addition, we have solved 3 smaller and one major bug, e.g. that the number of products in the shopping cart was wrongly displayed on some systems. For this reason, we recommend all our clients to immediately upgrade their Virtuemart Theme VaMazing. As usual, the new package can be obtained via the download area while logged in or directly via the download link you were sent per mail after your purchase.

Important: Since the theme.xml was also modified, it is essential that you open the Theme Configuration after updating the package and save it anew. Update instructions can be found in the update.txt contained in the package.

So long,
your Yagendoo team

After some time, we have now published a new update for our Joomla! component "Virtuemart Search Center". On several systems, errors occurred under certain circumstances. Unfortunately, solving these problems appeared not to be so easy due to the variety of settings options, and some errors had not been solved after the last update, resulting in repeated delays for the release of the new version although the Support Tickets announced differently. We'd like to apologize for this and hope that you'll understand. Mistakes happen, and that's unfortunately also true for us ;-)

No more errors occurred after repeated testing on several client websites in this version, so all of the reported errors should be solved now. There are no new features in this version, but we are planning to integrate some features you suggested in a new version already this summer. We cannot yet estimate how long the release of the new version will take, but we'll keep you updated.

A complete list of the solved errors can be found in the change log file included in this package. As always, you can find the new version in the download area of your client account. If you ordered more than half a year ago and the download is no longer available, please write a Support Ticket containing your order number and we will re-start the download period. After all, this is a bug fix and we don't want you to pay for it again.

In this spirit, enjoy the new version!
Your Yagendoo team

Already a few days ago, we published an update for our VaMazing Virtuemart Theme. All clients who have not yet updated to version 1.2 are highly recommended to do so. The package contains a text file that describes how to update the package without losing your configuration’s settings. This update solves such issues as, for example, 7 smaller and 2 major errors. In addition, we have added some new icons.

Once you’re logged in, you can download the package with your download ID in your account. The link for this can be found on the right hand side of the client menu.

We have published a new version of our Virtuemart SEO. The current version cleans up many small errors, and the older version failed to translate some links from the Virtuemart modules. These and other problems have been solved. The Virtuemart SEO enables you to create search engine friendly URLs in Virtuemart without external components and with the exclusive use of the Joomla! Core SEO. This is very helpful when optimizing your web site for search engines. After all, you want google and other search engines to find your Virtuemart shop. All further information on the Yagendoo Virtuemart SEO can be found under the following link. Virtuemart SEO Product Description

Only about 3 days ago, the Joomla! Core Team released Joomla! version 1.5.16. Unfortunately, 3 bugs slipped into the package, making the package inoperative on some systems. For this reason, a new version was now released with version 1.5.17.

We recommend you to implement this update straight away, especially if you have not updated to version 1.5.16 yet, as this version closed some security gaps that your clients and you wouldn’t want to have in your Joomla! ;-) Further information on the Joomla! update can be found on the Joomla! main page.

So don't forget to update!
Your Yagendoo team

Starting today and in the context of the related release of our latest Virtuemart theme "VaMazing", Yagendoo introduces a new concept. We have decided not to offer any stand-alone themes anymore, i.e. browse pages, fly pages and main pages in the future, meaning that in the future, we will only offer Virtuemart themes covering all areas of your Virtuemart shop and delivered as a package. The positive effect will be that installation will be yet easier and compatibility issues will be eliminated. In the past, although we had not expected it, the latter had not been the case for some users, and installation problems kept turning up. That's history!

The New Virtuemart Themes Standard

With the new standard, we cater to our clients' wishes, offering a simple Virtuemart Themes all-in-one solution that prevents any sources of errors during the installation process. In addition, we are now offering a universal and comprehensive documentation covering all steps of the Complete Theme installation process, which only takes a few steps. It could not be any simpler. We hope to have made your wishes come true.

The New Virtuemart Theme VaMazing

The Virtuemart Theme VaMazing is the first Virtuemart Theme to fulfill the new standard. The theme comes with 9 different colors, and thanks to the number of parameters, you can make various adjustments to your theme. You can find all other information on the product's side.

Here we are! After months of work, preparations and a lot of organizational issues, we are ready to herald the next level. We owe our reputation to our work as Virtuemart experts under http://www.joomla-virtuemart-design.com and by creating Virtuemart Themes, templates and add-ons.

 

For the future, however, we will no longer restrict our competencies to this niche sector.

 

We have a lot of ideas and twice as much enthusiasm to assist you in upgrading and expanding your website. A lot of new stuff will be awaiting you on Yagendoo. Look forward to this, and, in the meantime, check out our new products and, above all, our new website.

 

Relaunch special: feel free to use "yagendoo" as coupon code and you will get a discount of 10% on your total order.

We will keep you up to date.
The Yagendoos

An issue that never failed to give me a headache and cost me many hours of work. The realization of a truly good optimization for Virtuemart SEO doesn't sound so complicated at all. But it is! At clients' work stations and now also in the course of our re-launch, I spent many hours optimizing Virtuemart free of bugs and large amounts of double content for SEO, but one thing or other always failed to work out. I had actually been testing each and every external SEO component, even including the testing of offered router.php files, had been configurating, trying to outsmart the program, and changing items, at one time not being able to obtain agreeable results, at the other time losing the functionality of whole Virtuemart functions, and whenever I managed to create a nice URL, I was unable to allocate modules to these URLS, except by doing this globally for the whole shop, which is just not acceptable for a good shop. I don't even want to touch upon the issue of the large amounts of URLs linked to one and the same page. Virtuemart SEO is really a tedious issue.

In addition, one runs the risk that by relying on external SEO components that fail to achieve satisfying results for Virtuemart anyway, development of these add-ons will be abandoned one day or other. This has already been the case with many established SEO add-ons. Just recently, sh404SEF developer Yannick Gaultier has given users of his components a true fright. So far, sh404SEF will eventually still be further developed, but who can guarantee me that this will also be the case in the future? What will happen if the development is abandoned one day or other? I would be facing a problem with my online shop. If consequently, I had to rely on some other solution, 99 % of my shop's URLs would be subject to change. What is this implying for your online shop? Exactly - in respect of search engines, with all links being lost, it is bound to catapult itself onto the scrap pile. The only alternative would be to create a 301 redirect - manually, ideally. Have you ever created a 301 redirect for 5,000 product links? You haven't? But you can imagine the amount of work this would imply, can't you? And as if this wasn't enough already, it's anything but certain that google & company will love you just as much as before. I don't want to cause you any frights or talk disrespectively of other components; they all have their reasons for existence.

But to me personally, the risk for my online shop and consequently my existence would be too high. So why not confide in the Joomla!-included SEF function and thereby optimizing my Virtuemart SEO? Anyway, it's a gospel truth that the Joomla!  SEF will exist as long as Joomla! itself!

On our part, we will from now on rely on the Joomla! SEF, without any risk and even obtaining better results. Of course, we don't want to exclude you from this solution, and have consequently now added the Yagendoo Virtuemart SEO to our product portfolio. You will find more information on Yagendoo Virtuemart SEO right here --> Virtuemart SEO