Thanks to you, and all your feedbacks and improvement proposals, I’m proud to present you this new major release of FLEXIcontent. You will find inside very exciting new features like the advanced multilingual support, the universal content plugin support and much more… A lot of bugs were also fixed and some part of the code were totally rewritten for performance improvements...

Multilingual : Advanced Joomfish support

FLEXIcontent is now fully Joomfish compatible and can manage multilingual contents in its own UI. Concerning the categories you can either choose to translate them with Joomfish (that means category views will be filtered and only display the contents of the site's active language) or build multiple structures (if you want to build a different category structure for each language) and design your template accordingly.

To translate one or multiple contents, simply duplicate them with the new advanced copy/move feature.

When you select the "activate Joomfish support" option, the content elements needed to translate field properties, tags and files are automatically installed.

File manager batch add

This feature will help you increasing your productivity by adding all the files from a directory to your file manager. This allows you to upload 1000 files through ftp and add them in one click. You can add only files with certain extensions or use a regex on the file name for a more accurate filtering.

SQL queries to build select fields

Now you can choose standard field elements (a list you type yourself) or sql queries to build your select (and select multiple) fields. For example you can easily build a select list containing all Joomla users, virtuemart products or whatever you want. It makes the integration with third party components very easy. See it in action in the next paragraph ;)

Universal content plugin support

With this new system, you can easily develop your own field plugin, according to your needs, without having to code anything. How? By using content plugins. I think that a good sample is better than a long explanation :-)

Imagine you wish to display an audio player for diffusing a podcast inside an article.

Download the excellent josdewplayer from my friend JM (infograf768) http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/multimedia/audio-players-a-gallery/4779

Install it and publish it.

Now create a new select field as shown on the following screenshot

1 : Trigger the content plugins on this particular field - in this case we will only import josdewplayer because we wish to build a podcast player

2 : We now use prefix and suffix for the plugin syntax {play} {/play} from josdewplayer

3 : Generate your file list with an SQL query to get all mp3 files from FLEXIcontent's file manager

This is the list generated in the content form. User will simply have to select the podcast in the list which is more practical than type {play}images/stories/media/01-leon-takes-us-outside.mp3{/play} in the description text, isn’t it?

And this is what the visitor will see on the website.

Advanced copy/move feature

This new feature allows you to easily copy or move contents with powerful options like choose a suffix, a prefix, number of copies, language (Joomfish required), state and keep tags or not. As a professional websites builder, I’ve always been wondering why it doesn’t exist in standard because it may spare you a lot of time.

Import Joomla! structure

This is a cool feature for lazy people like me ;-). It allows you to duplicate and convert in one click your entire Joomla com_content structure. It will make a copy of all your existing sections > categories > articles and transform them into categories > subcategories > contents. On the previous beta 3 you had to do it manually using the com_content copy or move function.

I choose to copy instead of moving in case you don’t like the component and you wish to revert to the standard com_content management (I hope not !!!)

New templating system

The templating system was partially refactored to make it easier to use and more flexible. A conversion procedure and a tutorial will be writen soon ;)

A template can contain an item layout and a category layout. Each layout can have its own parameters, field groups, css files, js files, images and very soon language files.

The parameters are now directly accessible in the type, category and item screen (in the beta 3 it was in the menu items). There’s of courses a “copy parameters” system, which allows you to copy all parameters from a source category to other categories. It functions basically with the same system than Joomla’s core templates.

This new system introduces a more ambitious feature in the upcoming RC release. The content kit import/export feature!!! This means the users will be able to import a complete content kit including the type, its fields and the templates (item and category). This kit could be considered as a component ;-)

Post install process

A post installer was created to list the install/update tasks. All processing is done trough ajax to reduce the load.

Other improvements:

• Field parameters loaded through ajax when creating a new field (thanks to Aka)
• Import tags list
• Copy types
• All fields are usable in category views
• Fields new parameters for better tuning
• Content plugins are triggered on fields in item and category views
• Active Itemid (route.php) rewritten to take care of the multi-mapping
• SEF url (router.php) rewritten to build pretty urls with Joomla’s standard sef

All bugs found by our users were fixed

A complete changelog will be enclosed in the component for more details.

I hope you will appreciate this changes. I really did my best to improve and stabilize the existing basis. This beta 4 release is a little special for me, because it’s my last own release as unique developer.

I’m proud to announce you that Akarawuth (joomlacorner) and Rafael (dioscouri) join the project as co-developers. I’m convinced that together, we will make this project reach a higher level. I will write a more complete post on that subject very soon.

Oups I forgot the beta 4 release date…

… S . A . T . U . R . D . A . Y !!! :-)