This major update is updated for Joomla 4 support and a lots of new features and improvements.

Guru Pro 6.0.0 includes the following important updates:

• Joomla 4 support
• PHP8 support
• Course list layout: improved default view and new list view
• Course detail layout: improved default view and new Modern view
• Improved Lesson layout and support dark and light theme
• All pages are improved for better layout & style
• Improved responsive for all pages.
• Back-end dashboard improvements
• Social sharing and Open Graph
• Bug fixes

Joomla 4 fully compatible

Guru Pro 6.0.0 is fully compatible with Joomla 4 – the latest long-term support Joomla version with stunning new features, new frameworks, and tons of improvements.

Pro LMS templates included

Guru Pro works with all Joomla templates, in the demo site and quickstart package, we are using the T4 Blank template.

We also designed 3 dedicated templates for Guru Pro. The Pro templates will be free for Guru Pro users with quickstart packages for Joomla 4 and Joomla 3.

JA Sensei –Demo

JA Educatsy – Demo

JA Coach – Coming soon

PHP8 support for better performance and more secured

PHP7 ends soon, time to switch to PHP8. Make your online LMS website faster, more secured with PHP8.

Front-end is almost re-designed

1. Course list layout

New stunning list view

Improved grid layout with better design and more info

2. Course detail layout

New modern layout

Improved default layout

3. New lesson view layout with light and dark theme

4. Teacher profile layout

Teacher dashboard views

5. Student dashboard pages

New layouts and improved design for Guru modules

Better responsive design

Guru Pro is responsive at core to present your courses beautifully in all responsive layouts: desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile.

Improved back-end dashboard

Social sharing integration and Open Graph support

Guru Pro now supports Open Graph to help manage the looks of all content shared from your site. Show your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn streams easily on your site.

It also integrates AddThis which allows you to add social sharing function for your online course website.

Improvements & bug fixes:

• MPDF new version upgrade
• Fixed Guru Categories menu module issue
• Fixed incorrect Course duration

Download and installation

Available download packages:

• Guru Pro component
• Quickstart packages for Joomla 4 and Joomla 3
• Pro Templates: JA Sensei and JA Educatsy with quickstart packages for Joomla 4 and Joomla 3
• Guru modules: Guru Courses, Guru Search, and Guru Categories
• Guru payment gateways plugins

Download Get Support

Guru Pro is the best Joomla LMS! creates an online course, university or school and helps generate revenue. The Joomla LMS extension is easy to set up and manage, rich-featured and beautiful responsive design for all pages.

The new version includes the following major updates:

• Joomla 4 compatibility
• Fully PHP8 support
• Improved design for all pages
• New course list view – List view
• New course detail view – Modern view
• Lesson layout with dark and light theme
• Back-end dashboard improvements
• And more

View Full Details

At the same time, I started PeepSo, a WordPress alternative to BuddyPress. It launched in 2015 and it’s been gathering popularity and fans ever since.

Working on such big projects, with more than 20 team members, has been fun, challenging and exhilarating.

During the past year though, I’ve found myself drawn towards other interests and towards new challenges unrelated to open source software. As those interests grew, I decided it was time to retire.

It was a big decision and it was important to me to find a good home for iJoomla, for JomSocial, for my team and most importantly, for our customers — a home that will nourish and allow everybody involved to grow and succeed.

Today, I’m happy to announce that iJoomla is officially a part of JoomlArt.

I’ve always been impressed with JoomlArt, they’ve been on the cutting edge of Joomla development, mainly focusing on templates but always growing and innovating. I had the pleasure of meeting the CEO, Hung, in 2015 when I visited Hanoi. He has a large office in the middle of the city and a big team of dedicated professionals.

Recently, JoomlArt launched a product that I think will revolutionize Joomla development. JA Builder’s easy drag and drop lets anyone create modern and beautiful Joomla websites. A builder like this is exactly what Joomla needs to compete with WordPress’s various builders such as Divi Builder. I believe it’s even better than any of those tools.

The iJoomla and JoomlArt teams in Hanoi

JoomlArt is the perfect new home for iJoomla and JomSocial and for its customers. All the team members will be working for JoomlArt, so I expect the transition to go very smoothly. Some of the team members were invited to Hanoi last month to meet the team there and to come up with a plan for working together remotely, as well as to produce roadmaps for the various products.

The PeepSo project is also changing hands. The new owners are project manager Eric Tracz and lead developer Matt Jaworski. You can read more about that on PeepSo’s blog.

I’d like to thank all the customers over the years for putting their trust in me and in my team. I would also like to thank my team members who have been an absolute pleasure to work with, always keen to learn and grow, to embrace new challenges and to strive to be the best.

Thank you and all the best!

Merav Knafo

P.S. Read about this on the JoomlArt blog!

A couple of months ago, I asked our iSEO customers a couple of simple questions:

• What do you LOVE about iSEO?
• How can we improve iSEO?

We received dozens of great responses. Here’s a summary, and our thoughts:

What Customers LOVE About iSEO:

Bartosz Machnik loved the meta tags manager:

“It’s simple, fast, efficient. It allows me to fill in data on one page and save a lot of time. It’s the strongest argument for ISeoPro for every big website.”

Daniel Baron loved the central organization:

“For example, with the metatags manager, it saves a great deal of time to not have to worry about putting in page titles, keywords, or descriptions in each item. It also helps me because I use ZOO on my websites.”

Dwight Layton loved having everything just where he needed it, and the help to improve his SEO:

“It can be so confusing to jump around inside Joomla and wonder, ‘Did I put in the meta tag titles, keywords and descriptions?’ With iSEO, I only have to look in one place to manage all of them. Plus, iSEO has taught me how to track my keywords, link my keywords and do redirects, which I neglected before. Best of all, iSEO has video tutorials to help the user set up each section in iSEO. Like all of the iJoomla products, the layout and functionality are very intuitive and easy to use.”

Bonnie Pelnar also loved the convenience:

“iSEO puts all the important necessities into one convenient place and makes it so easy to track performance and modify settings if needed. It looks at SEO from so many different angles that I had not thought about, or had been too busy to deal with before.”

We also had a number of quick, encouraging responses:

• “Best SEO extension… not missing anything.”
• “Everything is in one place.”
• “Good interface and explanations.”
• “The efficiency of seeing everything at once to manage pages easily.”
• “The meta tags manager and the support and learning videos.”

What We Can Improve:

Bonnie Pelnar  has been struggling to get Google keyword tracking to work.

“Even when I have a site that is in the first or second position, I don’t see those numbers in the program.”

Google is making it harder to display position results because they show different things to different people based on location and other factors.

Dwight Layton would like to see more updates on integrating iSEO with current Web marketing techniques.

“I think this would be helpful and pertinent to keeping the product and the users up-to-date on web marketing.”

I’d say there are many resources out there for SEO and we should probably dedicate our resources to improving the software, but thanks for the idea.

Daniel Baron wanted an easier way to share his knowledge.

“It would be great if there were some front-end capabilities that I could teach clients to use without having to go into the administration.”

This idea has come up before. We will look into it again.

Bartosz Machnik wanted more keyword linking.

“It is a great idea to automatically build ‘in article; links but lack of functions destroys the effect. You should expand that module with:

1. A way to restrict the number of links on one page. If I use dozen of keywords some articles are almost unreadable.
2. A way to restrict the number of links on the whole website to control external linking.
3. A way to give every keyword a priority to determine which keywords are linked on the page within a given limit
4. Maybe some Google webmaster tool integrations to detect inbound links, a way to submit pages for index, etc.”

Bartosz makes some great points there, and we will look into all of them.

J.B.W. Hollander had some insights from WordPress.

“The best SEO-plugin for WordPress is, in my opinion, WordPress SEO from Yoast. They have their Meta Manager beneath the post where you can, in real time, fill out the SEO options. It gives you the green light if the text, title and keyword follow the Google standards. That’s one of the options I’d love to see in iSEO: making the SEO text with the original text above it means fewer clicks and more attention to good SEO content.”

We are familiar with this plugin and we will look into adding the textual analysis .

Dennis was thinking along the same lines:

“Real time keyword, title… proof if you write any text, with a score [indicating] how good the text performs in SEO sight. A connection to a tool like SEO Power Suite.”

Good idea! We will look into this for sure.

Alex Shelestov wanted more dynamic data:

“Such as Title: Welcome to <page uri> or PHP embed, $_GET() for example.”

This has been on our radar for a while. Keep an eye out for it.

Angela Sanders wanted a keyword database:

“A way to create a list of keywords that can be categorized and stored then inserted with a click of a button when you are creating new pages.”

This is an interesting idea. We’ll look into it.

Joel Widengren had his eyes on integrations:

“The automated integration with third parties, components, modules and plugins [ca] always improve due to a closer interaction with those providers. I also love your JomSocial product. I still think it´s the best on the market.”

Thanks, Joel. What can we improve in our third party integrations?

Samir Massioui just wanted more help:

“Better support.”

We recently got rid of our forum support and are using a much more reliable support system called HelpScout.

And Miran Martin wanted more explanations:

“In the software and on the buttons, for example.”

We will go over the backend interface to make sure it’s clear.

Conclusions:

It looks like most of you are happy with iSEO, but there are some things that don’t work as planned or can be improved. You also had some great ideas for additional features that make total sense to add. We will be implementing some of them in the next version.

Winners:

• 1st place: All iJoomla products ($1044 value!) – Dwight Layton
• 2nd place: Guru Pro ($299 value!) – Bonnie Pelnar
• 3rd place: Socialize template ($99 value!) – Joel Widengren.

Thank you to all the participants and congratulations to the winners!

A couple of months ago I reached out to our Ad Agency customers. I asked them two simple questions:

• What do you LOVE about Ad Agency?
• How can we improve about Ad Agency?

We received dozens of fascinating responses, and I’d like to share some of them with you.

What do our customers love?

Stephen Bruce loves that he can hand this revenue-generating solution to customers who have no Web development knowledge:

“Automating ad space revenue helps my clients who don’t understand Web development. It’s simple for them to just approve ad submissions, and the system does the rest. “

Stephen Hawkins (not that Stephen Hawkins!) loves beating Google:

“It puts the power of AdWords in the complete beginner’s hand in a simple, user-friendly yet powerful way… giving the potential of making AdWords a second choice. Defeating Google is always good.”

Antonis Prelorentzos loves the targeting possibilities and the ad flexibility:

“I love the targeting options that an agent can set from the backend and also the possibility to have roles and zones in a complex system so the ads can be set up in different types.”

A few answers mentioned they love the integration with JomSocial. Canet said:

“Compatible with all Joomla and other social [products] like JomSocial.”

Many wrote that they loved Ad Agency’s simplicity and ease of use:

“Easy to configure and use.”

“Simple to use, functional and practical.”

“Ease and efficiency of ad management.”

And Jon A. Arbay summed it all up perfectly:

“Seamless integration and stability of the product.”

So how can we improve?

Many customers said they wanted more documentation and help:

Theo Chambers said:

“Better documentation and Snagit videos with a few examples from point A to point Z. Develop a serious social media campaign on how to monetize your website or blog using Ad Agency. Training a few affiliates to be trainers… and giving them for example 25% or more on each package they purchase. Ad Agency is the most powerful UNKNOWN web and blog monetizer! “

Jon A. Arbay wrote:

“More support for the novice Web people.”

Kimberley Barreda wrote:

“Better documentation on how to set up packages using stream ads [and a] nicer layout of advertiser dashboard.”

Jens Kirk suggested we add AdWord-like features, with weighting for impressions.

“Just like on Google AdWords where we are allowed to speed up an ad or let it be more slow and cheap.”

Silke Schäfers said:

“Multi-language support and invoices with tax declaration.”

Stephen Hawkins wants an improved user interface…:

“Bring the design of the backend (front end too) more to the tune of scripts such as phpmydirectory in all of your scripts…”

…and a better support forum:

“I find it really difficult to find answers in there regarding Ad Agency or Publisher. It seems that the mix between Premium Paid Support and Free User Forum is getting messed up a lot. It’s not very intuitive and what seems intuitive such as clicking My Recent Posts/My Posts displays nothing.”

We didn’t like it either which is why we recently switched to HelpScout. It delivers a much better user experience.

Ole Avranden said:

“The thing I miss the most in Ad Agency is the possibility to place the ad module in the content (via Modules Anywhere), and keep the possibility to use keywords as a trigger.”

Actually, both those options are available. You can place modules inside content by using the [loadposition position] tag and you can target by keywords.

Peter Kaminski wanted a faster response in the backend… and support for HTML 5:

“We have about 100 ads simultaneously, so if we change a special ad or something else, it needs sometimes 15 seconds for a response of the GUI.”

That sounds pretty serious so if you could post a ticket with this issue, Peter, we’ll look into it. We may need to improve the code, so it would be good to see a live example.

“Also support for HTML 5 would be fine. Our customers sometimes ask if we support HTML 5 ads.”

That’s on our radar for sure! We’ll deliver better reporting via email, complete with a logo and an improved layout. Look out for it.

Kimberley Barreda wanted to be able to put the same ad in multiple zones of the same size, and she also had an idea to get advertisers up and running faster:

“Automatic advertiser approval instead of them waiting.”

This one might not be such a great idea, but if there’s demand, we’ll implement it. Please comment below if you like this idea.

Video advertising is certainly on our radar, as suggested by Rob Manser.

“Video pre-roll and post-roll options to tie in with JomSocial videos.”

Howard Duggan wants to be able to clear old stats again:

“Clear old stats function desperately needs to be re-introduced.”

This was an oversight in the new design. We will bring it back ASAP.

Antonis Prelorentzos had a think and came up with a number of good points:

“I think there are four main things that could be improved in Ad Agency:

1. The system can have more specific geo-targeting options.
2. The ability to cooperate with other modules so that the results of keywords could be more dimensional and accurate.
3. The ability to get user profile info for best targeting… such as gender, age etc.
4. A more complex way to count clicks… could help a lot for the system to be fairer to advertisers. This could include rules that count clicks per session, per IP, per specific time, etc.
5. A way to give advertisers in their profile a more specific image of the success of their ads with different kinds of statistical choices.”

There’s a lot there for us to think about but #4 is already done in integration with JomSocial. Please post a comment with more details about the other points.

Justin Dixon wrote:

“We had to stop using for our clients because all ads would disappear when cache was enabled. Have contacted support without ever getting replies back. Would be nice if this was resolved.”

We are looking into this. Hopefully, we will have a solution soon!

Conclusion:

What stood out most to me was the request for more help in implementing Ad Agency successfully. I also noticed some of the requested features are in place already which means we didn’t do a good job communicating them to you.

We will start by creating more resources, then move on to implementing some of the features you suggested. More details soon!

The Winners:

• 1st place: All iJoomla products ($1044 value!) – Stephen Hawkins
• 2nd place: Guru Pro ($299 value!) – Theo Chambers
• 3rd place: Socialize template ($99 value!) – Antonis Prelorentzos

Thanks to everybody who participated! We look forward to implementing your ideas and continuing to give you the best ad management tool for Joomla!

So what’s new in Guru 5?

Look And Feel

Categories And Courses

We’ve completely revamped the look and feel of course categories, lists of courses and course pages. They look so much better!

Great-Looking Quizzes!

We figured that quizzes shouldn’t be mean and scary, so we gave them a major makeover too. Check it out…

Guru 5 Quiz with Media

Beautiful Lessons

Lessons now open in an elegant window that’s easy to use. The list of lessons and the module are on the right, and students can move easily between lessons, make comments and see the lesson description.

Adding Media

Adding and editing media design always did need some love. They got it!

Adding media now looks a lot better!

Better Usability

We put a lot of work into improving the usability of Guru 5. We really wanted to raise your conversion rate and bottom line by making Guru easier for users… and you should find that your life as admin has got a lot easier too!

A BIG Call To Action

On the front end, we’ve put a call to action button on cover photos and we allow newly registered members to continue the purchase process.

A big button to buy the course is now present on the course cover image

Free courses have a more accurate message, lessons have descriptions and quizzes now allow for retakes right from My Quizzes page.

Removing Students from a Course

On the back end, you can now remove a student from a course, and we’ve added “save and new” button when creating lessons.

On the back end, you can now remove a student from a course, and we’ve added “save and new” button when creating lessons.

Categories Module

The Categories module now shows an icon of your choice for each category. It looks great.

Improved Teacher Interface

The teacher interface now looks and works much more smoothly. A new menu item even allows teachers to view, rate and comment on essay answers. Very useful!

New Shopping Cart Design

We’ve completely re-designed the shopping cart, here’s how it looks like:

See Guru 5 In Action!

We’ve installed the stable version of Guru 5 on our learning center. If you want to see how the front end looks, you can check it out now.

View the change log here.

Upgrade Guru Now!

If you have an older version of Guru installed, please ugprade it to enjoy this fantastic new version! You can upgrade in one of two ways:

1. Using iJoomla Installer – SUPER EASY! Simply click the update button
2. Uploading the new version – EASY! Simply download Guru, and install it on top of your current version.

License Expired? Get 20% OFF!

When you renew your Guru license, you get it for 20% off of the original price! For only $237, the brand new Guru is yours! Visit our downloads page and click the renew button!

Don’t have Guru?

Guru is a fantastic Joomla LMS that will transform your site into a full-fledged learning system similar to Udemy or Lynda.com.

Because the Guru 5 Beta 1 release went so smoothly, we’re already able to release Guru 5 RC1. This is a very stable beta and if we don’t receive too many bug reports from you (fingers crossed!), we’ll be able to release a stable version very soon.

What’s New In Guru 5 RC1?

Complete RTL Support!

Our designers worked like crazy to make all of the many Guru pages RTL-compatible. We’ve now added an option on admin to switch to RTL Mode. Give it a flick and all Guru pages will show in RTL.

Perfect English Language Strings!

We gave our editor the important task of making sure all the language strings are in perfect order. The result is a much more professional and consistent Guru.

New Menu On The Back-End

We’ve re-organized the menu on the left to make it clearer and more user-friendly.

More Stability

In this round we fixed bugs reported by our customers and also squished bugs or logical issues found by our team.

Ready To Try Guru 5 RC1?

Do give Guru 5 RC1 a try and tell us what you think. But remember that this is still a beta version so don’t use it on a production site. You can download Guru 5 RC1 on My Downloads page, simply download the Guru Pro package and unzip it.

Don’t Have Guru?

Guru is the most advanced Joomla LMS on the market, it allows you to start generating passive income from selling online courses. If you don’t have it yet, what are you waiting for? Buy it here.

See Guru 5 RC1 LIVE!

• Visit our learning center to see how Guru 5 RC1 looks!
• Visit our demo site to see the admin interface

Guru 5 Quiz with Media

I am happy to announce the release of our highly anticipated Guru 5 Beta 1. This version has all the exciting new features and the complete redesign I mentioned in my last blog post. It is the ultimate Joomla LMS!

The new Guru looks and works beautifully! It will take your learning center to a whole new level.

As we’ve been explaining the improvements coming to Guru 5, we’ve received lots and lots of messages from excited customers. They’ve told us that the extra features were exactly what they were hoping to see. It’s been hugely encouraging. I’m sure you’re going to love it!

How to download Guru 5 Beta 1:

1. On iJoomla.com navigate to My Downloads.
2. Click the green download button of your Guru product. If your license has expired, please renew it and receive a 20% discount.
3. Unzip the package and find the “Guru PRO 5.0.0 Beta 1 (Joomla3)” folder.

How to upgrade:

You don’t need to un-install anything! Just install the new version on top of the old version.

1. Make sure your Joomla version is up to date (current version is 3.6).
2. Upload the component (com_guru_pro_5.0.0_xxx.zip).
3. Upload the module (mod_guru_courses_3.0.4xxx.zip).

Do not install this beta version on a production site:

Guru 5 is still a beta version and should not be uploaded to a production site. We do not support beta versions, so please only use it on production sites.

Found a bug? Submit a bug report

We want to know about any bugs you find on Guru so we can fix them quickly and get to a stable version as soon as possible.

If you find a bug, please submit it here:

https://www.ijoomla.com/report-a-bug

Please follow our bug report template to help us understand the exact issue:

http://beta.jomsocial.com/guidelines

Ready to try Guru 5 Beta?

Get Guru 5 Beta here!

This is a sneak peek at what you can expect to see. The plan is to release Guru 5 in early April. When it comes out, I’ll talk you through the details.

Look And Feel

Categories And Courses

We’ve completely revamped the look and feel of course categories, lists of courses and course pages. They look so much better!

Great-Looking Quizzes!

We figured that quizzes shouldn’t be mean and scary, so we gave them a major makeover too. Check it out…

Beautiful Lessons

Lessons now open in an elegant window that’s easy to use. The list of lessons and the module are on the right, and students can move easily between lessons, make comments and see the lesson description.

Adding Media

Adding and editing media design always did need some love. They got it!

Better Usability

We put a lot of work into improving the usability of Guru 5. We really wanted to raise your conversion rate and bottom line by making Guru easier for users… and you should find that your life as admin has got a lot easier too!

On the front end, we’ve put a call to action button on cover photos and we allow newly registered members to continue the purchase process. Free courses have a more accurate message, lessons have descriptions and quizzes now allow for retakes right from My Quizzes page.

On the back end, you can now remove a student from a course, and we’ve added “save and new” button when creating lessons.

Categories Module

The Categories module now shows an icon of your choice for each category. It looks great.

Improved Teacher Interface

The teacher interface now looks and works much more smoothly. A new menu item even allows teachers to view, rate and comment on essay answers. Very useful!

New Shopping Cart Design

We’ve completely re-designed the shopping cart, here’s how it looks like:

When Will Guru 5 Be Released?

We aim to release Guru in April 2016. We still have to finish a few details so we don’t have an exact date yet, but it won’t be long now!

See Guru 5 In Action!

We’ve installed an alpha version of Guru 5 on our learning center. If you want to see how the front end looks, you can check it out now.

We put a great deal of effort into making our support system the best it could be but we always felt that whichever system we used, it came up short.

HelpScout Nails It

Recently, we started using HelpScout on PeepSo, our new Social Networking Plugin for WordPress. We’ve been super impressed with its capabilities. We can monitor everything that’s happening, create auto-responders, ask for feedback on each ticket, and produce Happiness Reports which we monitor closely to ensure we give the best support possible. Every rating we receive from customers gives us insight into the issues they encounter, allows us to improve, and helps us to give you better support.

This transition has been very successful. As you can see, our Happiness Report for PeepSo is good, but there’s room to improve. We won’t be happy until we receive a 100% “Great” score.

HelpScout

How to use the new support system

1. Go to our Contact Us page and find the topic you’re interested in:


iJoomla Contact Us

2. Submit the support form. (Be sure to submit the right form. The support form differs from the billing form and other forms.)
3. During the workweek, one of our support staff will get back to you by email within 24 hours. If you contact us on a Friday or a weekend, you can expect a reply on Monday.
4. Reply to the email to continue the communication. We will work with you until all your questions are answered.
5. Rate the reply, and let us know how we are doing!

HelpScout Rate

What about the old forum?

You can still access the old forum at ijoomla.com/forum to search for questions and answers but you will no longer be able to submit new tickets.

I hope this explains our transition to a new help desk. If you have any comments or concerns, please post them below.