Whether you just launched a new Joomla web site or are maintaining an existing one, sooner or later you will look at ways to improve the performance of your site.

Simply put, you want your site to load as fast as possible for every visitor on your site. In addition, load speeds are now an important factor in determining search engine rankings.

There are many blogs, extensions and tools that address performance issues for Joomla but one of the easiest ways to speed up your site is to deliver the images, CSS files and other static elements using a content delivery network or CDN.

Back in June we quietly rolled out our new web site here at Anything Digital. We then took the summer to put the site through its paces and fix any outstanding issues.

I am now proud to officially announce the re-launch of our extension shop and tell you a little more about it.

Our previous site was restricted my numerous issues, most notably a legacy subscriptions extension that was prone to errors during payment processing. In addition, the system was not cart-based so users had to complete multiple checkouts to purchase more than one product.

Powerful subscriptions system

We solved this issue by writing a new subscriptions extension from the ground up. Subscriptions is a flexible extension that provides access to various areas of the site following a purchase. Perhaps most importantly, we spent months researching best practices for converting site visitors to customers.

The results of this research are visible in every aspect of Subscriptions from the registration-free, cart-based checkout workflow to the placement of the links in and around the site. All of the existing active subscribers were also imported from the old site to Susbcriptions.

We’ve all been there before. A friend or colleague has set you up and now your staring across at this stranger and wondering what to say.

Who are you? Where are you from? What do you do?

After some casual small talk, the date is nearly over and you ponder asking for a phone number or email address, and then the uncomfortable silence as you both wonder who is picking up the bill.

If you are like many online businesses, this is the very reaction your new users experience when visiting your site and enquiring about your company, products or services.

As in life, this type of blind date is tricky to navigate and can easily end in disaster.

As many of you have noticed, we have been monitoring and moderating  the forums very closely over the last few months.

Unfortunately, the volume of posts on the forum has increased steadily with our increased activity. As such, we are spending less and less time fixing the code as we devote time to the forum.

Due to popular demand, we will start publishing the known issues for JCal Pro® 2 in the Joomla 1.5 FAQs. As we find, verify and fix bugs, the page will be updated for quick reference.

Thanks again to the community, forum moderators and programers who continue to make JCal Pro® the best calendar for Joomla.

Cheers,
Victor Drover