As hinted in one of my blog posts, I had a few simple goals when I accepted the invitation from the Anything Digital’s owner, Victor Drover, to join the team:

• keep sh404SEF® alive so that the hundreds of thousands of users would not be stranded with a dead extension and no future for their search-engine-indexed URLs.
• keep sh404SEF® free, as in fully GNU/GPL. sh404SEF® is the only remaining SEF extension in the Joomla! world that remains fully GPL-compliant.
• make sh404SEF® cost-effective by setting and maintaing the price to support active development yet remain affordable for both hobbyists and web professionals.
• fix loads of longstanding bugs. DUH! :)
• start adding new features again, something that had eluded me for over a year before the move to Anything Digital.

I'm glad to say that we are now far beyond all of these humble expectations and I have to thank Victor for for pulling me into this adventure and starting what appears to be a an exciting and active future with Joomla!.

Another, and maybe more important thank-you goes out to all the sh404SEF® subscribers. I have a feeling that during the first months of this venture, some (perhaps many) people subscribed mostly as a token of gratitude for the previous 3 years of hard work creating and maintaining the software. That gratitude allowed us to achieve our goals (above).

These "early adopters" who trusted us by subscribing during the last months of 2009 did not do so in vain: we were able to deliver new things such as pageId, mobile template detection and most importantly the rebuilt backend interface. Again, Victor and I appreciate your trust in us more than words can express.

But enough reminiscing! Do we have a plan for the future? Have we anything in store to convince you, the sh404SEF® subscribers, that your faith in us is not misplaced?

In short ... YES!

First, you may know that Victor and I were both full-time professionals when we discovered Joomla. In order to provide the very best solutions to our subscribers we have put our money where our mouths are: both of us have retired from our professional careers to concentrate on Joomla solutions.

Our commitment goes even further. We can now confirm the rumors that sh404SEF® will indeed support Joomla 1.6. Its much too early to give a timeline but we’ll update you on this matter when Joomla 1.6 reaches the ‘Release Candidate’ stage of its development.

Heard enough? Still want more? Well you are in luck as I’ve kept the best news for last.

Today we are announcing that sh404SEF® v2.1 will support on-site Google Analytics so that you can monitor your web sites leading traffic indicators right from the sh404SEF® dashboard.

In addition, we are working on a companion product, sh404 Analytics, that will provide advanced traffic monitoring and analysis tools that are not available with Google Analytics alone.

We’ll be giving you lots more info on sh404SEF® v2.1 and sh404 Analytics in the coming days and weeks so be sure to watch your inbox, the Anything Digital blog and of course Twitter (#sh404SEF®).

Sincerely,
Yannick Gaultier
sh404SEF® Lead Developer