Is Open Source released an updated version of IOS Sitemap component for free. IOS Sitemap can generate multi-lingual sitemaps for your site. An HTML version of the sitemap can be generated for the normal site visitors and an XML one for the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The component populates the menu items and generates a tree representation of your site structure. If you have third party component installed IOS Sitemap has a number of extensions available that will expand its functionality on that components.

IOS Sitemap is strongly recommended for any Elxis web site as it is considered as food for the search engines. Let's see how to set up our sitemap.

1. Make sure you have SEO PRO enabled. IOS Sitemap can work even if SEO PRO is disabled but we strongly recommend you to enable it.

2. Download IOS Sitemap from EDC and install it via the Elxis component's installer. If you have Elxis 2009.0+ there is no need to download it from EDC and re-upload it in your site, you can download and install it with a single click from within Elxis administration (EDC installer).

3. Set IOS Sitemap configuration properly. Enable the extensions for which you wish their links to be expanded. If you have Static Cache enabled (Elxis 2009.0+) IOS Sitemap is ready to be cached, if not, enable standard cache from IOS Sitemap configurtion. This will make Sitemap to be loaded up to 60% faster (Static cache can reach the incredible 90% and it is recommended on heavy loaded web sites).

4. Create a menu item of type component that will link to IOS Sitemap.

5. Open your robots.txt file and write in it the URL to your XML sitemap. If you have more than one sitemaps (separately sitemaps for each language) write them too.

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/google.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/google-french.xml
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/google-german.xml

6. Go to Google's webmasters central and submit your sitemap.If you dont have an account at Google, create one, it is free.

You are ready to take all the advantages IOS Sitemap has to offer you. If you need more help or you like to translate IOS Sitemap in more languages visit the IOS Sitemap page on Elxis wiki.

Elxis 2009.0 Pandora just released. In this brand new Elxis version you will find some very nice new features and many improvements. We tried and finally managed to keep Elxis 2008.x and 2009.x fully compatible. This meens that you can use 2008's extensions in 2009.0 without any problem. Here is the complete changelog of the 2009.0 Elxis version.

• Locale support for BSD, Ubuntu, Debian
• Download and install extensions from EDC with just one click and directly from within Elxis administration. Read more on Elxis wiki.
  
• Content items and autonomous pages commentary is now supported. Read more on Elxis Wiki.
  
• Component content rewritten using fully object oriented programming. Speed improvements.
• Removal of English and Greek as required languages during Elxis installation.
• Removal of register globals emulation directive.
• New Error 404 page.
• Removal of the following configuration variables: MetaTitle, MetaAuthor, pagetitles.
• Check FTP settings in global configuration with AJAX.
• Introduction of Static Cache. A new cache method that caches whole pages instead of single block of codes. Read more about Static Cache.
• Clean cache tool was updated.
• You can now edit any CSS file of any template directly from within Elxis administration.
• Improved thumbnails generation.
• Fixed proper language re-direct after logout for non-default languages.
• Automatic user browser language detection and redirection during the user's first visit on front-page.
• Bug fix: gzip compression makes SEO title suggestion feature to stop working.
• Automatic rename of htaccess.txt to .htaccess from within Elxis installer.
• User account expiration control (subscriptions system). Visit Elxis wiki for more information.
• Implementation of Simple Pie as a replacement of Domit for RSS feeds management. RSS feeds now support multimedia content.
• Control of onload attribute in body tag. Read more on Elxis wiki.
• Module Polls modified in order to show poll results for users that have been voted.
• Added Arabic, Polish, Romanian, and Czech languages.
• Brand new Elxis CMS installer
• Four front-end templates pre-installed.
• Automatic removal of installation folder after installation procedure is complete.

Many other small improvements and additions were made. We would like to thank all the translators that worked for this version, Kostas Stathopoulos and the other members of the Elxis Documentation Team for their contributions to Elxis Wiki, the users from the forum for their ideas and help and all of you that support Elxis CMS and help us continue developing this superb content management system.

Download Elxis 2009.0 Pandora rev2432.

Elxis just acquired a new gallery component, IOS Gallery. It is a lightweight, easy to administer image gallery with some very usefull features. Supports unlimited categories, multi-lingual title and description for your gallery, the pictures and the categories, tags (labels), watermark on images for their protection, automatic thumbnail generation with resize and crop for perfect thumbnails, latest pictures and 2 display methods to choose from, Lightview and Galleriffic.

To see a live demonstration of IOS Gallery visit Isternia's gallery.

Download for free IOS Gallery from the Elxis Downloads Center.

If you wish to contribute by translating IOS Gallery please visit the special post we have open at Elxis forums for IOS Gallery translation.

For more information and help you may visit the IOS Gallery page at Elxis Wiki.

Rentasite is specialized in providing web services based on Elxis CMS. The company provides a wide range of services for small-to-large scaled businesses and individuals since 2000. Spiros Panagiotakopoulos, company's manager and owner of Rentasite.gr, is well-known to Elxis users for his support in open source and Elxis CMS. His company is living proof on how a company may use an open source project as a business tool leading to success. Spiros Panagiotakopoulos has also published a series of Elxis CMS templates and other extensions, which you can download for free from the Elxis Downloads Center.

Rentasite.gr had recently have a make-over which we specifically enjoyed. The re-designed web site is aesthetic, pleasant and navigation-friendly, with very good internal linking among pages. The icons used in the web site are excellent and carefully selected. We also enjoyed IOS eshop's addition to the web site. Nice product images, good listings, excellent SEO optimization, analytical descriptions of the services provided. The Elxis-eshop pairing combined with such top-quality design,
leads to guaranteed success. Congratulations.

At last, a full featured shopping cart component for Elxis CMS is available. IOS eshop is a native Elxis component meaning that it was created just for Elxis CMS, programmed in PHP 5 using object oriented programming (OO), runs smoothly and errors free and supports all Elxis unique features such as multi-linsguim, the extensible ACL system, cross-database support, SEO PRO for search engines friendly URLs, etc. Currently IOS eshop is available for online purchase to a limited number of people (mostly translators and beta testers) in a few days it will be available for all. An online demo and a full detailed user guide will also be available in a few days. Read more about IOS eshop.

Many new things in Elxis CMS just some days before the Christmas holidays and the new years eve. First of all a new updated version of Elxis CMS. Elxis 2008.1 rev2245 contains some bug fixes but also some new features. You can now set the status of an eblog article to published or unpublished and you can also set to generate RSS feeds from eBlog items! You can set to display sites screenshots in component weblinks when you create links to weblinks categories. Added support for Hebrew language in SEO PRO by default. Most fixes are for better postgresql/oracle compatibility. Download the new Elxis 2008.1. We also published a patch to update to the latest version, and we updated the Elxis 2008.0 to 2008.1 automatic updater script.

We also re-built the Elxis Downloads Centre (EDC). EDC has a new template (thanks to Ivan Trebjesanin), new software runs the site and we have a new download manager (from File Server to IOS Downloads) that supports more features than the previous one and is more modern and SEO friendlier. We believe that the new EDC web site is easier to navigate and to find the software people need. We hope you like it!

Last but not least, a new powerful component was released. IOS Downloads is a new downloads manager for Elxis CMS created by Ioannis Sannos (Is Open Source). You can see a list of IOS Downloads features on the EDC web site. You can download the component as well as 4 modules for it for free, from the EDC web site.

We would also like to thank Spiros Panagiotakopoulos for his Christmas logos on the forum.

We need volunteers to translate the new IOS Downloads component in more languages. IOS Downloads is a powerful downloads manager for Elxis CMS created by Is Open Source that will be released for free in a few days. The component will be the heart of the new Elxis Downloads Centre web site but will be also available to download and use it in your own sites.

Translation guidelines
Download the original English language package:
IOS Downloads english language pack
Unzip it locally.
Edit the 2 included language files with a text editor that support UTF-8 such as PsPad.
Re-name it based on the translated language (i.e. italian.php, german.php, etc).
Zip it and send it via e-mail to datahell [at] elxis [dot] org.
The component is already translated in Greek language.

You asked for it, you got it!
By popular demand, Elxis will soon acquire a powerful component for handling file downloads. Downloads component is a download manager equipped with all the features you might need. Besides the main purpose of the component, which is serving download files, it also provides an advanced interface for showing file details. The component supports: unlimited categories and sub-categories, multilingual descriptions and titles for categories and files (IOS dialects system), search, selective access to downloads, statistics, tags, files commentary, featured, listings, SEO PRO URLs, new listing submissions from the Elxis front-end, integration with IOS Newsletter component, integration with Sitemap component, and a bag of goodies. The component is a free offer by Is Open Source to the Elxis community and is estimated to be released mid-December 2008.

There are various types of extensions in Elxis CMS, each one providing certain functionality. The heart of the application is the components. In Elxis on each click you do, whatever if you are on the site front-end or back-end area, one, and only one, component is being loaded. This component will process the visitor request and display the html output. Each component has a specific functionality. It can be charged for a contact form generation and process (contact), for displaying site links (weblinks), for displaying sections, categories and articles (content), for polls (poll) and more. Yiou can extend Elxis features by installing or developing new components. From a developer point of view, a component is nothing more than a PHP file (actually more than one) that is being automatically included by Elxis when it is requested. Which component will be included each time is controlled by the value of the PHP global variable $option. You can see the value of the $option variable by watching the Elxis URLs (disable SEO PRO for a while).

http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks

At the example above component weblinks is being requested. Elxis will automatically include this file:
components/com_weblinks/weblinks.php

If $option has not been set then Elxis will load the site front-page  (component frontpage).

Developing components for Elxis in comparisson to developing autonomous applications that have the same functionallity has many advantages the most important of which is that Elxis provide us with a powerful framework ready to be used. So we can focus on the application itself and do not care about issues such as connecting to a database, handling users, external PHP classes, etc. A detailed how-to guide for Elxis component development published recently by Is Open Source. You can download this guide for free from the Elxis downloads center. You will also find many tech related posts on the Elxis forums while you can also study the Elxis source code online at code.elxis.org. If you have any questions Elxis forums and Elxis Live are open 24 hours a day!

Kostas Stathopoulos, also known at the Elxis forums as ks-net, is a man with low profile that lets his work speak instead of him. He is an experienced web designer, passioned supporter of open source and owner of the ks-net.gr web site and the homonym company.

Determined to support and promote open source software and especially Elxis, Kostas Stathopoulos has released a number of templates for Elxis CMS under the GNU/GPL license and seems determined to continue amazing us with new designs in the near future.

Some of the ks-net templates for Elxis

You can download for free Kostas templates from the Elxis Downloads Center or from the web site that he has created and maintain for this purpose, elxis.ks-net.gr. For those of you that look for professional solutions and designs you may visit his company web site ks-net.gr.