With the release of BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro for native Joomla 1.5.x comes the necessity for Search Engine Friendly URLs.

One excellent way to achieve this is by using sh404SEF. You can download the sh404SEF component from the sh404SEF site. 

Andrey Kvasnevskiy has rewritten the sh404SEF plugin for BookLibrary (which was already available for BookLibrary 1.0.2) to work with native Joomla 1.5 for BookLibrary 1.5.2. This will create SEF URLs from the book categories and book titles automatically.

Get the BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro sh404SEF plugin from the downloads section.

We are very proud to announce a native Joomla 1.5 version of BookLibrary Pro. OrdaSoft and Andrey Kvasnevskiy have been working hard these past months to rewrite the component, and have done a great job! And after extensive testing, we now have a final release.

While BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro has the same functionality as the BookLibrary 1.0.2 Pro version, it has been completely rewritten for native Joomla 1.5.x.

BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro is available from our shop for $35.

New BookLibrary release policy

For the moment there will not be a free version of the 1.5.2 release.
In order to be able to sustain continued development, we will release free versions only when
a) the development costs have been covered by sales & donations, and
b) a new version with new features is ready. 
But Booklibrary 1.0.2 Free Edition will continue to be available free of charge for download and testing.

BookLibrary Features

BookLibrary provides you with a full-featured book library or book collection management environment on a Joomla-based website. BookLibrary Pro adds new features for the professional librarian on top of the original features of the BookLibrary Free edition.
The component can also be used to easily set up a book selling shop using Amazon if you want. With an Amazon Associates ID you can earn credits with book sales from your site through Amazon, while Amazon takes care of the handling and shipping. BookLibrary contains a lend/return management, as well as an interface for book suggestions and book reviews by users and email notifications for admins.

In the time to come we will also start on rewriting the various modules and plugins for use with the BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro version.

BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro requires:

Joomla 1.5.x, PHP5 with SOAP, CURL, XSL, GD and MB_STRING

BookLibrary 1.5.2 Pro offers the following additional options:

• Hides book affiliate links (shows internal Joomla URL)
• Hides book affiliate links from download managers
• Hides direct link to eBook download (shows internal Joomla URL)
• Hides eBook download from download managers
• Optional button [Suggest Book] with AJAX show-hide form (allows users to suggest books)
• CAPTCHA for Guest [Book Reviews] & [Book Suggestions]
• Typed [Book Reviews] kept on screen even when wrong CAPTCHA is entered
• Code to allow use of external plugins in book descriptions
• Pulls in Editorial Reviews (book descriptions)(works only from amazon.com)
• [Print Report] option with fields choice in [Book Manager]
• [Review Manager] for user submitted book reviews in the backend (all user book reviews on 1 page)
• Email notification to admin when [User Review] added
• [Suggestion Manager] for user suggested books (all user suggested books on 1 page)
• Rights setting who is allowed to suggest books
• Email notification to admin when [Book Suggestion] added
• Email notification to admin when [Lend Request] is submitted
• Optional [Suggest a Book] button with rights settings
• Show-hide [Buy Now] button with Category selection
• Rights settings for showing [Book Price]
• Option [Show eBook Download License] (allows license display before download)
• Option [Set Review Notification] email address (multiple email addresses possible)
• Option [Set Suggestion Notification] email address (multiple email addresses possible)
• Option [Set Lend Request Notification] email address (multiple email addresses possible)
• Option [BookID Auto-Increment] or [BookID Manual Entry]
• Option [Show Subcategories] to show or hide subcategories in main category list frontend
• English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish language files included

Full feature comparison between Free and Pro editions

You can see a full overview of all feature differences between the FREE and PRO edition of BookLibrary in the article: Feature comparison BookLibrary Free and Pro

Preserving your books when updating from previous versions

Updates from the 1.0.2 Free and Pro editions can be done using XML exports of your book categories. The procedure is described in the article: BookLibrary upgrade instructions.

Updated BookLibrary Italian and German Informal language files are available for download from the BookLibrary Languages section. There are separate downloads for BookLibrary 1.0.2 PRO and BookLibrary 1.0.2 FREE.

The Italian language files were corrected by native speaker Massimiliano Leo.

The German Informal language files were corrected by native speaker Jörg Drescher, http://www.iovialis.org/. The zip files contain both ANSI and UTF-8 encoded files.

A big thanks go to both contributors!

The module is released under the GNU/GPL, and you can download it from our Joomla 1.5 Modules section.

The advantage of having the maps in a module is that you can copy the module in the Joomla backend. Thus you can have many different maps with different configurations on your site. You can then load these modules in your content pages using loadposition.

The module has the following parameters:

- Google Maps key
- Map Center - latitude
- Map Center - longitude
- Zoom Level
- Latitude for marker
- Longitude for marker
- Width of map (px)
- Height of map (px)
- Text Message for marker
- Show Map Type Menu (Map-Satellite-Hybrid), yes or no
- Show Map Controls (Up-Down-Left-Right), yes or no

As mentioned, you will need a key from Google Maps for the module to work. You can request a (free of charge) key from  http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html for your website.

You can report any issues with or questions about the module on the support forums on this site.

This has proven to be not so good a month for JoomlaWebServer uptime...

A major transport network problem (in the ATM part) in one of the main national bandwidth providers in the Netherlands (KPN) has hit every provider who buys bandwidth from them, including wholesale providers like XS4All, Solcon and Telfort (including XS4ALL, the provider for JoomlaWebServer). Tens of thousands of ADSL lines were affected and down in the Netherlands. This resulted in on and off problems for a few days, followed by an almost 36 hour complete outage.

Things have just returned to up-and-running again at 18:00 CET today, and we hope the problems are now solved for good and the situation returned to stable.

Our apologies for the inconvenience caused by the website not being reachable.