The new RSMembership! revision comes with an important number of added functionalities : the One-Time Payment Settings option, the Custom fields tab and the Trial periods for memberships.

One-Time Payment Settings

Beginning with the rev. 11, you can find new options for one-time payment: you can set different prices for renewals, when creating a new membership in the Joomla! backend panel.

So, when a user wants to renew his membership, he can now pay a different price than he did the first time.

Also, here you can configure the membership coupon discounts - coupon codes and prices.

As we're expected, the J and Beyond 2010 event was fantastic: a massive density of Joomla! geeks gathered to share ideas and knowledge acquired within years of development.

It has been a nice experience to meet the people behind the screens and associate a real face to a photo or avatar from twitter, Facebook or the Joomla! forums. (You can find lots of photos from the event on the JandBeyond Flickr group.)

Besides the 45 speakers invited to held presentations, there were organized, for the first time, the Joomla! Oscar awards for extensions, templates, websites and individuals.

Congratulations to the winners!

The last 2 RSSeo! revisions have brought among new functionalities, some important crawler changes: the ability to use RSSeo! without loopback connections.

What does it mean?

To be able to analyze site pages, RSSeo! must first crawl your website. In order to perform this task, it requires at least one of the following functions to be enabled: cURL , fsockopen , fopen , file_get_contents. Most hosting providers impose some restrictions in using these, only allowing one of them and loopback connections. The last one (loopback), basically implies that a script can't get the content of page if the call to the function is made from the same host. You can imagine that this seriously affected the RSSeo! functionality, preventing the proper meta data management.

Beginning with RSSeo rev. 7 and 8, there are 2 more options available to run RSSeo!, besides using the loopback connections: connection via a configured proxy server and PHP exec function.

Recommended workflow:

Option 1: Loopback connections via cURL , fsockopen , fopen or file_get_contents

(available for all RSSeo! revisions)

This is part of the RSSeo! minimum requirements: to be able to run RSSeo! you must have enabled at least one of the following functions cURL , fsockopen , fopen , file_get_contents.
In case your hosting provider doesn't allow loopback connections, then head to the second option.

The new RSTickets!Pro gives a new meaning to the help desk extensions for Joomla!
Most of the features requested on RSJoomla!'s feedback were included in the new release: backend ticket management, reporting tool to measure the support efficiency, FAQ system.

Backend management

1. Manage tickets:

If you spend most of the time logged in the Joomla! backend panel, then the RSTickets!Pro is for you (the ticket management can also been done in the frontend).

The staff members can now manage tickets from the backend. They can reply to tickets, close or reopen, edit or delete tickets, add internal notes or view the existing ones.

They also can modify the ticket information: edit the subject, the status, the priority, the staff member or assign the ticket to a different customer.

Backend ticket management in RSTickets!Pro:

In the last part of this article we'll show you how to customize, using an example, the Joomla! forms created with RSForm!Pro,so you can build a small shopping cart.

The example is available on the www.joomla-form.com website and you can download for free. Notice that you must have RSForm!Pro rev. 28 in order to work.

To install the example, in the backend panel, head to Components -> RSForm!Pro ->Backup/Restore. After the form restore, you will find the Custom PayPal example in the Manage Forms tab.

Download RSForm!Pro custom PayPal example