Hello everyone,

it has been some time (much too long as usual) since I provided you with an update. YoFlash is currenlty undergoing some serious changes for two reasons: 1. the (old) game feed which contained 37 games only, had some problems and was not really usuable. It was complicated and time consuming to add new games and, as you can tell, nobody actually updated new game to the feed. In order to change that, I integrated some automatic features into the gamefeed. The new gamefeed conatins all games from fog.com as well as kongregate to start with. When new games from any of them are released, yoflash gamefeed will automatically integrate them into the new gamefeed and therefor onto the admin-interface of your webpage, making it easy for you to pull new games.

While the start of the gamefeed made fog and kong, I experimented with a lot of other feeds recently, that should be integrated into yoflash, for example spilgame or clay.io. Peopel who know those publishers know that they are releasing HTML5 games as well.

This brings me to the second new improvement: Getting yoflash ready to support HTML5 games. Supporting multiple game-types (flash, unity and HTML5) means to rewrite a lot of code in order for teh component to make it easy to import those games as well. Therefor a lot of changes need to happen which changes not only the code but also teh database structure of the component. 

While I will try to make teh update process as smooth as possible for you guys, I cannot guarantee that it will work smoothly. There will be some changes that only you can do, features that I implemented to make yoflash (teh component) as flexible as possible. I will write an update procedure befor the release of the next yoflash version.

As usual, I would love to hear from you and looking forward for some comments in the forum.

Regardos

  Yosh

Hello everyone,

it has been some while that I posted an update on the development blog. I am trying to do better in this years :-)

While it seems that it has got quieter around yoFlash in the last couple of months, I can assure you, that it has indeed NOT. Development is taking great steps ahead at the moment. Despite that a lot of bugs (thanks to slepoy and all the other guys on the forum) have been fixed new design questions have come into my mind to make the component more flexible and (most importantly) still easy to use for Joomla Administrators. One of the design questions that needed to  be solved (and I still haven't found a really great solution for this) is to how the yoflash-webpage cooperates into and with the yoflash-component. The feed from the yoflash webpage definately needs to be renewed AND it has been.

Soon you will find games from YoFlash, Kongreagte and Clay.Io in the yoflash feed. The servers checks every couple of days for new games and includes them into the yoflash feed. The real enhancement is that the yoflash-feed is actually quite flexible in the way that you can create your own feed-queries and save them in your yoflash-component so that you can actually search for the games that you really want (leaving the tons of crap that oyu do not want behind).

The image above shows games that come from yoflash, kongreagte and clayio.

For those of you who know clay.io, you probably figured it out already: YoFlash will be able to embed HTML5 games from other sources. It was clear from the beginning, that, in order to stay with the time, yoflash cannot just be able to import FLASH games but also HTML5 games so that users are able to paly it on there tablets and handheld devices. Again, there are a lot of design questions on how to implement that in an easy manner.

One of the biggest questions that had to be solved (and I still think about it), is as how much should the component handle and how much should my server handle. This is not just a question of design but also a question of money. With a server that handles incoming and outgoing connections as well as managing the feeds of other games webpages, the server needs to run robust. At the time of writing a started a beta-mode test, where I check that the feed handling and the copying of the images (and games) work correctly.

Talking about robustness (by the way). In the upcoming version of yoflahs you will be able to setup an FTP upload for games. While for smaller pages who just want have a games section on their webpage it seems to be a little bit to much, game portals may use this feature (and I am using it as well) to put games on a CDN (content delivery network). I will write a bigger article about that topic, once the new version is out. The basic idea is that your server still manages text as well as images but the games itself (which cause most of the traffic) are delviered by a cloud-service, like cloudflare. My internal tests showed quite a good success and a good though-put rate keeping my servers traffic low so that it still can handle a lot of connections at the same time.

And while I am talking baout the yoflash website. I took some time to create the new yoflash website which will go online soon. Despite that it is capable of integrateing the other feeds as described above, I also allow game developers to upload their own work on the yoflash webpgae so that publishers can use it on their webpages.

There is probably one billion more things I could talk about at the moment (like that the statistics module gets a new look) but I guess this is enough of upcoming changes at the minute. Please feel free to leave comments, questions or ciritics in the forums. I am always more than eager to know what you guys think about yoflash and progression. It means a lot and helps me and you to create a cool component that everyone likes to use :-)

Take care guys,

  Yosh

Dear all,

yoflash 3.0 (alpha) has been out for two weeks now and I just released the latest version yoflash 3.0.2 (still alpha) with tons of bigfixes and small improvements. AT this point I would like to thank everyone who took the time to test the component and reported feedback to the forums. This has helped a lot to find and fix bugs that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

The yoflash coomponent has a lot of bugfixes, but also small improvements. I included some module positions in the default template category and game page, which you can use to put your own modules in there. It is not as easy as it was in Joomla 1.6 to make those modules "look good" and I spend a lot of time adjusting the "advanced options" of a modules. So, make sure to check theese out as well and adjust the module layout to your needs.

For the category layout, we have the following lmodule positions:

• yfl_cat_top-top
• yfl_cat_top-left
• yfl_cat_top-right
• yfl_cat_bottom-bottom

The default game layout features the following module positions:

• yfl_befor_header
• yfl_after_header
• yfl_after_game
• yfl_after_tabs
• yfl_after_comments
• yfl_after_similar

Theese template positions will not appear in the position-box on a module; you have to write them manually. Adjusting the settings can be tricky, as the YoFlash does not know anything about the module height or width. It will spread over the whole space, if the content of teh module suggest so.

Also today, I uploaded a few plugins that I haven't yet published.

In order to have a fully working fgaming site, one obviously needs a search plugin, as well as a sitemap plugin. For the sake of easiness, I build a plugin for XMAP from Vargas. The component is free and I use it a lot to create sitemaps. And last but not least: The comments plugin for jComments has been released. JComments is a free comment component for your Joomla page that integrates into a lot of other components if they provide a plugin. You have to install the jcomments plugin manually. That means: download it and upload it into the directory components/com_jcomments/plugins (or so). (You might have to activate the plugin; I am not quite sure about this at the moment)

Hope you enjoy the new features and hope to hear from you in the forums.

Yosh

Hello All,

as time passes, YoFlash 3.0.0 (alpha) is getting very close to the first release. In fact by the time of writing this article I am just about to go to the final testing and creating of translation files. There has been a lot little changes in the form and structure of the component lately.I wanted to make it as convenient as possible for you to upload and change game information, this is why I introduced some new form sinto teh backend:

First of all: Games are now stored in a maincategory and (sub)categories. This is mostly for SEO purposes. While every game needs to be in a main category, I also implemented a kind of fallback mechanism. Also, have a look at the picture; You choose the categories from a drop-down list and this will automatically fill the main-category list. Nothing can go wrong there :-)

Secondly, the (I call it) Image-Form Element. Images are usually downloaded from the game-servers and saved on your site. However, if you do not whish to upload multiple images, there is a "X"-button next to each image which will tell YoFlash not to upload the image. Also, with the other button, you can change the pimage by uploading one from your computer. Just make sure the dimension are alright.

And last but not least: YoFlash does not (yet) use teh new Tagging-System provided by Joomla, but a very similar one. Tags can now be inserted by typiing and pressing eneter or , on your keyboard with a visual approach to show you the results:

I hope you like the final changes to the download-games form and I hope I can soon provide you with a first version of YoFlash. Final testing is on it's way.

Regards

 Yosh

Hi All,

as yoflash is progressing quite alright at the moment, it is time for another Blog Update. First of all, I have to apologize (as usually) for not getting back to you in the recent month. I was on a lot of trips around europe; but that's another story :-).

So, good news first: The yoflash 3.0.0a is getting into shape and I am currently bug fixing and working on the front-end of the component. I will hopefully soon have an early version for testing ready. If you are interested in testing the NOT stable version on your local machine, please let me know, by either writing into the forums or send me an email. I will let you know by email when there is something to download.

In the recent month, I was expirmenting about better integration of yoflash into Joomla. The new features from the latest Jomla version are very promising and in the future version I will try to integrate yoflash more closely to Joomla. But as I am programming and learning the new details of Joomla 3.3 I often find myself doing things that do not (yet) help the actual release of yoflash. Therefor it is time for a kind of roadmap:

Milestone 1 (Release 3.0.0a) :

• Get yoflash stable and ready for Joomla 3 (Joomla 2.5 and older will be droppepd) using the same approach as I used for yoflash 0.7
• Create and update script for the older versions.
• Get Feedback form the forum users to improve and bugfix yoflash 3.0.0.

Milestone 2 (Release of 3.1.0a):

• Drop the yoflash-category system and use Joomla's instead, as it is more flexipble and more intuitive to use for Joomla users
• Drop the yoflash-tagging system. In Joomla 3.3. tags where finally introduced. I had teh chance to play with the new system and I think it is good to use that instead of teh self made.

Milestone 3 (Release fo 3.2.0a):

• Migrate the yoflash-hosted games to another website (probably gamefeed.de) to seperate the component from the game hosting. The new page shall be used as a hub for free online games for the RSS and JSON feeds. The idea is to combine different services (FGD, FOG etc.etc) to create ONE UNIFORM and CONSISTENT feed. Obviously this has onyl indirectly todo with the yoflash component.
• This new webpage will include free flashgames, HTML5 games and (maybe) unity games giving you more power to create awesome games web pages :-)
• Integrate the combined feed to offer you guys more games from more and different distributors.

A not precise thought on cloud based hosting:

• The upcoming release of the Joomla Platform may have a library to access a shared drive. It would be cool, if a solution can be found to put games in the cloud (shared drive) and then download / embed it on your joomla website. With this way website owners would be independent from embedding games and their pitfalls (like the close of mochimedia) but wouldn't waste their webspace AND bandwith.

That's it for today. Share your thoughts and ideas in the forum. I am looking forward to a vibrant discussion :-)

  Kind regards

     Yosh