Summary

For your reading enjoyment, here is the January roundup.

After our slow month in December, we resumed our usual pace with 4 exciting extension releases this month.

These four will make a fine addition to any webmasters toolkit.

 
 

New Releases

CB Gallery - RC Moo

Our CB Profile Gallery modification finally brings one of the staple CB plugins into harmony with JSpaces.

Our number one issue with JSpaces right from the start has been with Javascript Conflicts. These almost always arise from having different Javascript libraries installed onto the one site.

JSpaces, like many other extensions, and almost every recent Joomla Template, uses mootools for it's special effects such as the drag and drop.

Well Nant's Original CB Gallery, fantastic as it is, was written before mootools was all the craze and so he included a prototype based set of javascripts to power the popup for your gallery images.

This however clashed with JSpaces's mootools library and we all know the end result - lots of posts on our forums about JSpaces not working!

The previous solution was simply to disable the fancy JS popup. This, as I am sure you will agree is not ideal.

So we have released a version of the gallery with both mootools and the original Prototype library included. Which of the two libraries you wish to use is now entirely up to you and can be changed with a single parameter.

Is that convenient or what!

Ninja Flashed

A simple, easy to use module, Ninja flashed allows you to quickly and painlessly embed rich media into module positions. Add youtube or other links, flash files and several other options.

Ninja Promo

Ninja Join Now was a huge success last month with over half our members downloading it within just a few days of release!

Following hot on it's heels is Ninja Promo, another module designed to help you give your website a professional, Web 2.0 look.

Based on the second common style of frontpage, Ninja Promo lets youshow a large screenshot or product image to one side of the page, with some brief information points and buttons on the other.

Again, we have deliberately left out links on the information points, so that you can guide your visitors selectively to the most important information on your site via the quick tour button, or let them register immediately with the join now button.

Just like Ninja Join now, you can combine the Ninja Promo with other modules such as the Now You See Me, so that only visitors see it, and your members see something else. Giving a very professional inside/outside feel to your site.

So stop waiting, and give your frontpage a facelift today!

Ninja Bot Control

At first glance the Ninja Bot Control module doesn't seem very interesting. It just stops search engine bots leaving your site. What is so important about that?

The few readers with extensive SEO knowlege however know just how significant this is to your site's search rank.  The guys over at ijoomla summed it up nicely:

Right now, as you read this, your site is bleeding. It's bleeding PageRank.

Every link that you place on a Web page makes another little hole in your site. Your users drip through that hole... and your PageRank leaks out of it.

Of course, you need to have links on your site. It's almost impossible to build a site without them. So what you can do to make sure that your links don't drag down your Page Rank and lower your position in the search engines?

Well you could pick up their redirect component for $40. By itself that is.

Or alternatively you can just grab the Ninja Bot Control, place it on the pages where you want to plug the leaks, and off you go! Page Rank and search listing bandaids were never this easy before.

We like this extension so much that it is one of the first extensions we are installing onto all of our own new sites.

The Ninjas

The staff situation here at NJ recently has been an explosion of top talent from around the Mambo and Joomla community. Time for a quick recount!

Mark Simpson, a very active Rocket Theme Pro Member known to pretty much everyon on there as GollumX has been handling our server support and working tirelessly on a new template for NJ.

Richie Mortimer, aka Ravenlife is organising our newer developers while producing and extension and providing support at all levels for our community. Richie originally sort of snuck in under the radar, but has since then contributed about 20-30% of the extensions here at NJ, and is very likely to have one of the highest counts for extensions produced by an individual developer. Richie also has an active presence at most of the major Joomla, and Joomla related forums so keep an eye out for him.

Ricardo Sousa, which many of you will recognise as one of the best Template Plazza forum mods and support people has joined us and is almost foaming at the mouth in excitement to bring you some amazing extension ideas he has been building up while seeing the issues that site builders face.

Matt Hayashida, a former Member of the Month at Joomla.org and a moderator with a massive 1,500 posts on the forums there is helping us cook up some new projects for you.

Ben Hornedo, one of the minds behind the outstanding events calendar JCal Pro, and many other major projects has been working on a couple of secret projects which we will be releasing soon.

Last but certainly not least is our Ninja artist Chris who I mentioned last week. Chris has been pumping out images for us to use on the new sites we have coming, and on our new logo so you will see alot more of his work around here soon.

Coming Soon

Our Ninja Template site is nearing completion and we hope to open up shop this month or early next month. It has taken a bit longer than anticipated because we want to make sure we get it right. 

So we have lots of exciting stuff in the pipe for you!