Hi everyone,

I know it has been some time since the last release of yoflash and a lot of people (includnig me) considered yoflash as being dead. The change in the Flashgames-market and the very fast changes that Joomla is undergoing lead to the fact that yoFlash needs to adapt to those changes. The closing of mochimedia has damped the development tim working on yoflash quite a lot and certainly one needs to raise the question where this component goes from here.

I spent quite some time thinking about what to do next and you can see a tiny result with the creation of the yoFeed (yoflash flashgames feed). So yoflash has it's own feed, which needs some restauration, but is working in a basic form at the moment. In future I might use the yoFeed to enhance the use of the component.

I have chosen to use an iterative life-cycle development where things are created one at a time and when every important thing is finish I come back to the first pages created and revise those. Otherwise teh yoflash component would never get to a release :-)

Soooo, where is yoFlash development at the moment?

The good news is: A lot of the main functionality is implemented. There are a lot of little things that need to be adjusted which usuall takes a couple of hours, but the main functionality is there. Having said this: I was in contact with the people of flashgamesdistribution as well as FOG.com and had some discussion about the implementation of their feed. Unfortunately, this hasen't shown the result that I was hoping to have. I therefor need to use some quirks an dtricks to get the games from flashgamesdistribution (which probaly is the major source for flashgames at the moment).

Yoflash 3 will introduce a "One-button" button feature as request by some users allowing to publish a game without going into the edit screen befor. Categories and descriptions as wel as pictures are taken from the feed and are inserted in your database directly. With that you can literatly create a games page within minutes.

Yoflash 3 will feature a new statistics module, which, if activated can show you details about which games / categories etc. run well and which aren't. The hope is to give you guys a kind of analysis tool to visualise what your users are up to, what they like and what they donÄt like.

At the moment I m finalising the upcoming release however, major changes will probably make their way into the component to 1. reduce code and make things more clear by binding the component closer to Joomla's functionality and 2. make it easier and more flexible for the admin/users to use the component.

I will try to keep you guys updated form time to time but I cannot stress enough how limited my spare time is at the moment; please be patient :-)

Regards

  Yosh

Image of the Control Panel

 Image of the Yolfash -> Add Games page.

Early image of the statistics page