The new features in Billets easily make it our best component yet.  You can now:

• Respond to tickets by email - and our smart email parsing works on any server with POP-mail
• Designate which of your custom fields are required, and have the submission form verified with some slick Ajax…
• DELETE tickets via your Billets admin-side control panel
• Allow un-registered users to submit a ticket (and have them automatically logged in afterwards!)
• Enable a Google-Translate plugin for your users to translate text into multiple languages WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR SITE
• Display your Frequently-Used Text WITHIN the ticket-viewing and ticket-creating pages, for quick and easy access
• View tickets via the Billets FRONT-END that are within the category you manage (you can simply click on the link you receive in the email notification!)

Upgrading could not be any simpler.  Our brand-new automatic plugin installer will install ALL the new plugins with a single click — and you don’t even have to uninstall your existing ones! You only have to uninstall the core Billets component.  None of your tickets, categories, fields or configuration settings will be lost.

We’ll upload some videos, tutorials, and screenshots shortly, but why wait? The new version is on the demo servers already!

For all of you subscribers, feel free to download now and ENJOY!

Please let us know what you think!  (and to you few Joomla 1.0 users, we’ll have that upgrade ready soon too!)

Thanks!

We’ve installed SCRIBA here on Dioscouri.com, so if you’d like to see how it works on a site with 30,000 users, then choose "My Conversations" from under the "My Profile" link above.  You will need to login.

Additionally, we’ve created a SCRIBA plugin that displays your Community Builder avatar next to your comments in conversations.  If you have an avatar, feel free to leave yourself (or us!) a message here on Dioscouri to see how SCRIBA works.

Hope you enjoy it!

Thanks!

Our next release will be SCRIBA, the Dioscouri Conversations Component!  It enables private conversations between all users on your Joomla website, and functions the same on your admin-side as it does on the front-end.

 If you operate a community-based Joomla website, then you probably have some basic components: a user profile manager, a forum, and a private messaging system (PMS). 

SCRIBA is our first step into PMS’s, and we’ve started from the ground up.  If you’ve ever used BaseCamp, then you’ll recognize the layout and identify with the beauty of its simplicity.

But that’s where SCRIBA is deceiving.  Check out our SCRIBA Demo (currently only for Joomla! 1.5).  Take a second to login to the Admin-side and disable the "Scriba - Participants" Plugin, and while it is disabled, go back to the Scriba component.  You’ll notice that the functionality of SCRIBA has completely changed.

We built the Scriba component to serve multiple purposes.  It is terrific for encouraging private conversations between your users that are hosted on your sites (like Facebook emails!).  Additionally, with the use of plugins, you can make Scriba look and operate ANY WAY YOU WANT IT TO.  In fact, we already have started developing a different plugin for adding participants to conversations — it uses a checkbox list rather than an auto-complete, and is more user friendly for sites with fewer users.

Here are some additional plugins that SCRIBA could have:

• Emails - users send/receive emails when a new comment is added to a conversation.  The ‘Settings’ can be user-specific, so a user can determine whether or not to receive the emails
• Editors - users can select whether or not to use a WYSIWYG editor when writing in SCRIBA
• Labels - users can create their own labels for conversations to help with organizing them (like in Gmail)
• Avatars - instead of the default ‘message’ icon showing up next to each new comment, a user’s avatar/photo could be displayed there
• Attachments - users could upload file attachments to their comments

The possibilities are endless here — its all up to your imagination!  Please check out the SCRIBA demo and let us know your thoughts in our Support Center so we can incorporate them before SCRIBA’s release.

Thanks!

We have significantly upgraded MANGA’s code to turn her into a plugin-firing machine, and what a success.  BUT, we need your report requests!!

We currently have four reports built for MANGA, but we have one crucial question:  What information from your Joomla! installations do you want better access to?

Here are some examples of the reports MANGA could provide, complete with bar graphs and pie charts:

• How many users registered each day for the past two months, and what are their email addresses?
• How many users registered between today and January 1, 2008 — and what percentage of *all* my users do they represent?
• How many sales of this VirtueMart product have I had over the past 10 weeks — and what percentage of its total sales does that represent?

It’s hard for us to guess exactly what you want, but we’re already working on a few reports for DocMan, VirtueMart, and Community Builder, but it would be better if you told us!!!

We’ve created a Report Requests category in our MANGA Forum.  Please categorize your requests there!

We will be uploading the MANGA Development section with tutorials on how to create Reports and Tools for MANGA, both of which are just Joomla Plugins fired by MANGA custom events.

We’re very happy to be able to finally offer MANGA to you.  It has been many months in the making!  Please give MANGA a test drive on our demo servers, which have the default Reports and Tools installed.  You will have to login to the Administrator side of the demo websites.

Thanks and enjoy!