Spiral Scripts News

We have a new extension, our 'Gatekeeper' plugin for Joomla 3.

This plugin allows you to restrict selected pages on your site from view. Until the user enters a code or codes of your choice, they see the page covered by a modal backdrop. It provides an easy way to steer users away from content that is not relevant to them, by restricting the page view from casually prying eyes. We originally developed the plugin for a fast food website, they wanted an easy way to check the post code of the customer before the custom placed an order. It could be used in many similar applications, where you need a simple way of challenging the viewer, to check if they should be seeing the page.

Features

The plugin has several features that make it very flexible in its usage:-

1. You can choose to restrict only one page, several pages, or all pages on your site
2. You can choose to set a cookie when the user successfully enters the correct code, so that they are not repeatedly challenged
3. All the text displayed in the plugin form is fully translatable, and can be overridden using Joomla language overrides
4. You can set one correct code only, or a list of acceptable codes, with a variety of ways of storing the codes

You can read more about the plugin, and buy it here.

You can see a demo here.

We are pleased to release a new version 1.4.2 of our extension Amazon Shopping Cart, and version 3.7.2 of our AmazonWS content plugin for Joomla.

These are maintenance releases, adding some new features. The most important new feature is that support for the Joomla update manager has been added, so that you will be automatically notified when future new releases of the shopping cart package become available, and will be able to install them with one click direct from your Joomla admin. (At the moment though, if you use the AmazonWS content plugin by itself then you will still need to download new releases from your account on our site). So for this reason you are recommended to update to the latest version.

The method of storage for the Amazon developer secret key has been improved, to make it less confusing, particularly to new users.

As with all our commercial extensions, when you buy the extension you get access to free updates for one year. Therefore existing customers can download the new version using their current download link. Then install as normal with the Joomla installer, there is no need to uninstall the existing version.

Amazon Shopping Cart is a complete package of Joomla extensions based around our AmazonWS Joomla content plugin, that allows you to create an Amazon store on your Joomla website, including a shopping cart. Customers can browse your site, and add items to their cart without leaving your site: it is only when they are ready to pay that they are redirected to the Amazon website.

• You can read more the Amazon Shopping cart here.
• You can view a demo of the Amazon Shopping Cart here
• You can buy the Amazon Shopping cart here

We have a new release of our Google Shopping Feed extension for Joomla! and Virtuemart, GooglebaseXML version 4.6.18. This is a maintenance release adding some new features.

The main new feature is that we have added a way to map values for product availability used in your store to the values which Google requires. This will be useful for stores that use the product availability graphics supplied by Virtuemart to indicate whether the product is in stock, now these can be translated into Google values for use in the feed (more on this below).

The other new feature is that we have added a language code to the feed url for multi-language stores. Most of the time this should not be necessary, but this can solve problems that occasionally arise with the Joomla router.

You can buy the GooglebaseXML extension here

New Version 4.6.18 for Google Shopping Feed