In this release, you’ll find some exclusive new features that improve usability, compatibility and performance. Of course, all bugs discovered in the beta4 release were fixed (there were not many), but the major improvements are focused on usability and performance. The first part of the selective cache is now implemented and ready for production, this new version is now fully PHP5.3 compatible and the field positioning is now done through drag and drop so that a 5 years old child can do it himself.

Improved Versioning

Aka has done a great job on this feature to debug and improve the process.

• Current version remain restorable (in case of bad restore)
• Alert before restoring
• Fields are now versioned correctly

Templates duplication

Templates folders can be duplicated through the admin so that you don’t need to access the ftp for that task. It’s extremely practical when duplicating a template for fields ordering issue only.

Drag and drop templating

Template zones are located on the right and available fields on the left. The template description is collapsible so that your fields always face your template zones.

To display or order a field in a template zone, just drag and drop it.

Advanced filtering

This feature is very similar to the upcoming Tienda ecommerce component from disocouri. We had a long talk with Chris from joomlajunkie.com, who gave me the smart ideas to make it perfect (according to my standards).

The filters are now located in the column headers. As the filters are persistent, every filtered column is highlighted in yellow and a small red icon next to the column title, allow you to remove the filtering for a specific column.

A new option to retrieve all items from a category node is now available (include subcategories).

You can also filter on specific dates, range of creation, modification or simply get a specific ID.

All these new options we make the happiness of the administrators having to manage more than 50 articles on their websites ;-)

New advanced caching system: Part1

The first part of the cache is now fully implemented. Every item is cached separately; it doesn’t require you to activate the Joomla cache. When an item is modified, only this specific item is recached.

At the moment there are two new cache folders, one for the items, the second for the category tree. In the next release there will be more ;-)

A new class for fields

We wrote a new class for fields to allow you (with basic php knowledge) to bind the fields to any data row very easily. It will allow you to adapt every content module with a few lines to allow them displaying your fields.

PHP5.3 Full compatibility

Everything is in the title. Even the dynamic thumbnailing and caching can now be done when using PHP5.3 (we fixed the excellent phpThumb library for that)

Changelog

# Fix the uninstaller that uninstalls the editor image button instead of the image field plugin
# Fix the ordering column that looses focus when you filter by type
+ Gives an ordering by default to all new created fields
# Fix the bugs in versioning and make the process more efficient allowing to switch back to current version
+ Add the confirmation before restoring
# Fix recalculate pagination when changing the limit in every backend view
# Fix missing pagination in tags and favourites views
# Replace TINYINT format of the ordering field format by INT to avoid being blocked when there more than 127 articles in a category
# Fixing publish_up / publish_down missing check in category and items views
+ Add the category tree in the system plugin with its specific cache layer
+ Add templates and template backend views
+ Add the duplicate template feature
+ Add the drag and drop field positioning feature for easier templating and multiordering
+ Add the advanced filtering UI for items view in backend
# Fix the email field not storing the value when it doesn't allow multiple values
+ Add external fields class to be able to call fields from everywhere and its specific cache layer
$ Add languages missing strings
+ Add css override in directory, tags and favourites views
# Fix bug in filter search box
+ Name the filter objects to allow to call them and label them individually
+ Print option for the category page (usefull for product catalogs)
+ Add confirmation alert before deleting items and templates directories
# Fix the one col/two cols bug in default item template
+ Add parameter to allow to totally disable FLEXIcontent CSS.