We are excited to announce that ZipCodeShop has been acquired by a private investment group here in Atlanta. We will be providing more details in the upcoming weeks about our new corporate parent as well as our new product offerings. We are expanding our development effort to include releases for the growing mobile handset market and are currently testing our new component for Layar in-house.

If you are a PHP developer, you will be happy to hear that we are creating a developer directory that will allow you to offer your services to our clients looking for customization. Many of these corporate customers need a local developer who can meet on-site with their staff to design and implement their custom project.

We will be closed for the Memorial Day holiday on May 31, 2010.

There has been some confusion as to the different versions of the legacy component on the download page. We provide two different versions for specific needs.

1. The original component as delivered to customers, but with no encryption. This version does not have any bugfixes but can be used to migrate modifications.

2. The bugfixed version of the original component. This version requires the legacy plugin but has bugfixes and no longer requires "call-back" to ZCS to work. It will install on Joomla 1.0.x.

Neither of the versions is supported by our customer support team. We will also not be releasing any updates or patches for these versions. You run them at your own risk. In order to develop a component for both Joomla 1.0.x and 1.5.x a lot of compromises have to be made. We don't recommend running either of these on a production site.

If you have any questions related to either of these components, contact customer support through email or live chat.

We are in the final stages of the chat server update. We will be re-enabling chat on May 25 at 9:00 AM (GMT-5). If you need customer support assistance today, please use the ZipCodeShop email address you received the purchase confirmation from.

We will be upgrading our server software starting at noon today. Chat will be unavailable. We expect to have normal chat service restored Monday morning.

We just wanted to post a quick update on the demo status. We had reports of a bug on the Mosets Tree Pro Search release soon after the rollout. Customers were reporting they would click on the links on the search results but the pages would not open. This only happened on a subset of the full customer base.

We have finally tracked down this bug. It is an issue with the Mosets Tree SEF and not the ZCS Search Component.

If you have multiple links with the exact same name you cannot use the default SEF method "Alias" links under Mosets Tree > Configuration > SEF URLs. You must select "Link ID" for the SEF method. Alias uses the link name in the SEF URL. If two listings have identical names then Mosets Tree doesn't know which link to display as the URLs for two different links are identical.

For example here are the SEF URLs for two listings on our demo site:

http://www.zipcodeshop.com/demo/Mosets_Tree_Demo/mosets-tree-directory/ruby-tuesday/32439

http://www.zipcodeshop.com/demo/Mosets_Tree_Demo/mosets-tree-directory/ruby-tuesday/32438

with Alias set as the SEF method instead of Link ID, both URLs are:

http://www.zipcodeshop.com/demo/Mosets_Tree_Demo/mosets-tree-directory/ruby-tuesday/ruby-tuesday

When you click on this link, Mosets Tree just shows the link list and not the individual listing.

We have updated our customers this morning with this information and we are updating all of our documentation. Now that we are confident this is not a bug, we will be publishing the demos today.

For those of you that have asked, our new "key-free" search form uses the Google Maps API v3. Google decided to drop support for IE6 with version 3 so our new search form does not work with IE6. However, we still include the older form which uses Google Maps API v2 (and a key) if you need to support IE6. The non-javascript enabled search form should support almost any browser.

Eventually we will drop support for IE6 altogether. So encourage your customers to upgrade their browsers.

We want to say a big thanks to all of our customers who upgraded to the newest version of the search. We will soon be releasing some new add-ons that we think you will love. All at no charge to subscribers.

The demo servers for Community Builder and Mosets Tree are now live with the newest version of Joomla, Mosets Tree and Community Builder. While we will always have the current release version of all three running on the servers, you will see the actual system requirements listed on the "Buy" page for each component. Make sure your server meets these requirements before purchase.

We will have links on each server to walk you through creating a test listing or profile along with a link to the ZCS search page for each server later today. Please be aware that all data on these servers is visible to the public. Please do not use any location data you would not want the general public aware of.

We can't emphasize strongly enough that you should make a site backup, both files and database before attempting any installs or upgrades. We don't have a relationship with or receive compensation from Akeeba Backup but we have had really good results using it during a few hundred installs/upgrades.

http://www.akeebabackup.com/