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Category: News

Published: 30 August 2023

Last Updated: 30 August 2023

Hits: 3129

Community Builder 2.8.1 can be freely downloaded by all registered members

At Joomlapolis, we are proud to announce the new maintenance-release Community Builder 2.8.1, refining the functionality of CB 2.8 for online communities, with 10 new features to amplify user experiences and 21 issues fixed, some of which are significant improvements, especially for Joomla 4 sites.

With a vibrant user base and an unwavering commitment to open-source principles, Joomlapolis continues to empower hundreds of thousands community managers and dozens of millions users alike.

CB 2.8.1 is compatible with Joomla 4 (currently at 4.3.4) and Joomla 3.10* (currently at 3.10.12), as well as with all our latest CB add-ons.

Striving for Continuous Improvement, One Detail at a Time

While these may not be big changes, the small improvements in Community Builder 2.8.1 will make a noticeable difference. New features introduced by CB 2.8.1 include:

• Even More Flexible Profile Layouts: Enhancements in placeholder substitutions provide site administrators with a greater level of control over profile layouts. This subtle customization option adds new possibilities to user profiles.

• Fine-Tuned Joomla System Fields: We introduce publishing statuses control for Joomla system fields, reducing clutter on user profile edits by allowing the hiding of unneeded system information and settings.

• Embracing Enhanced Security: The inclusion of the W3C Web authentication plugin reflects our steadfast commitment to safeguarding user data and privacy.

• Database Collation Checks: A pragmatic tool for assessing database collations ensures a smoother and faster user experience by maintaining database integrity, now also on character-set collations for CB tables and columns.

• Dual CB Date Display: By imbuing CB date fields with dual functionality—displaying both age and birth dates—we foster deeper connections among users while displaying accurate dates if needed.

• Refined Aesthetics: While seemingly subtle, the optimization of CSS styles on specific CB pages contributes to a more harmonious and precise visual experience.

Improving Stability and Future-proofing

Beyond these improvements, Community Builder 2.8.1 diligently includes 21 pertinent bug fixes, the most important being:

• Form Token Enhancement: We bid adieu to form timeouts with the inclusion of missing keep-alive form tokens rectifying the issue of timeouts in forms, and allowing for uninterrupted user engagement when users get … interrupted for a long time while filling in a form.

• Enhanced Joomla 4 Compatibility: We ensure Joomla 4 compatibility remains seamless by also saving Joomla user parameters on CB profile edits.

• Multi-Language Compatibility: Multi-language sites within Joomla 4 receive the attention they deserve, as we resolve a Joomla 4 compatibility issue to foster inclusivity.

• PHP 8.2 Support: By fxiing PHP 8.2 deprecation notices, we guarantee sustained performance on modern server environments and future-proofing for next PHP 8.3.

• Smoother User Importing: We enhanced user management through improved user importing, streamlining data formatting and error detection during user imports.

A Gentle Push Toward Progress, Stability and Security

For Joomla 4 and Joomla 3.10* sites, Community Builder 2.8.1 is a highly recommended upgrade. The cumulative refinements and fixes reflect our commitment to enhancing the backbone of millions of online communities.

We're proud to note that the features introduced in CB 2.8.1 were carefully rolled out to our community one by one through our famous nightly releases. This meticulous approach ensures that these features are now stable and well-tested in real-world scenarios. Your upgrade should thus be seamless, benefiting from the proven reliability of Community Builder in the field (standard disclaimer: better be safe than sorry: As usual, regular backups are always highly recommended!).

For a comprehensive overview of the changes introduced in Community Builder 2.8.1, please refer to the complete changelog. If you are upgrading from an older CB release before CB 2.8, you may also benefit from reading the CB 2.8 announcement.

* By the way, if you are still on Joomla 3, we strongly encourage you to consider upgrading to Joomla 4 at your earliest convenience.

Empowering Communities Together

This maintenance release underscores our unceasing mission to offer a platform that enhances the very core of community interaction. By opting for a Membership and/or making a modest Donation, you play an integral role in the advancement of Community Builder and in the collective evolution of Free, open, and thriving online community spaces.

Shape Your Space, Embrace Evolution - Explore Community Builder 2.8.1 along with all our CB Add-ons Today on our CB Demo Site.

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Category: News

Published: 24 August 2023

Last Updated: 24 August 2023

Hits: 2050

Joomla 4.3 is here with Guided Tours!

Joomla 4.3 introduced Guided Tours, a game-changing feature!

Guided Tours is now the first top menu in the Joomla administration, guiding new users in creating their first article, adding a category, or menu. This interactive walkthrough redefines how users engage with Joomla 4.3, offering step-by-step guidance for seamless onboarding, personalized learning, and enhanced satisfaction. We believe that by spotlighting features and empowering new users, guided tours are set to redefine how users interact with Joomla 4.3+ and will significantly boost Joomla's uptake.

Simplified Onboarding

Newcomers can navigate Joomla 4.3 effortlessly with guided tours. Interactive prompts and tooltips provide intuitive step-by-step guidance, reducing the learning curve and boosting confidence.

Contextual Learning

Guided tours provide real-time context, allowing users to learn as they explore. Tailored explanations while using the platform bridge the gap between what users want to do and how to do it, enhancing learning effectiveness.

Empowered Users

With guided tours in Joomla 4.3, new users gain a solid grasp of the platform in record time. They're less likely to need extensive documentation or support, making their Joomla experience smoother and more independent.

Accessibility at the Core

Joomla's commitment to accessibility extends to its guided tours, ensuring that people with disabilities can fully benefit from the feature. Just like the entire Joomla platform, guided tours are designed with inclusivity in mind.

Tailored Experience

Joomla's guided tours aim to cater to diverse expertise levels. Beginners receive comprehensive guidance, while advanced users can skip introductory tours, ensuring personalized assistance as more advanced tours get gradually added.

Create your own Tours

Moreover, you have the possibility to create your own guided tours specific to your site to assist your users' onboarding or to help them discover and use new site feature.

Joomla 4.3's Additional Features

Joomla 4.3 brings many more new features, including a revamped Media Manager, workflow improvements, enhanced tags, custom fields, and menus. It also upgrades to Bootstrap version 5.2 and enhances support for PHP 8.2.

Stay Up to Date with Joomla 4.3.4

Yesterday, Joomla released version 4.3.4, a maintenance release that improves and fixes minor bugs. We encourage all users to stay up to date to ensure they have the best experience with Joomla.

In Summary

We think that Guided Tours will redefine user interaction in Joomla 4 by simplifying onboarding, enabling contextual learning, and unveiling hidden features. This feature exemplifies Joomla's commitment to a user-centric approach that enhances engagement and success, all while driving an increased uptake of the Joomla platform.

About Joomla 4.3.4 and Community Builder

Joomla is currently the most accessible CMS available. It stands as a robust and mature product powering millions of websites. Unlike a lot of other CMSes, its code-base is clean, solid, and inherently secure from the ground up.

Community Builder 2.8 latest build and all Joomlapolis add-ons run just fine on this solid new Joomla 4.3.4 release, as can be seen on our Community Builder and add-ons Demo Site.

To help you discover or present Joomla to your friends or customers, the Joomla marketing team has prepared a Joomla 4 brochure, in 15 languages, that you can download here.

Learning more

You can find additional information about these new features by reading the Joomla 4.3 announcement and the Joomla Magazine article about Guided Tours.

Contributing back

Finally, Joomla welcomes help to enhance and add guided tours to the core.

And if you are eager to contribute to the open-source and free CB, we would also warmly welcome a contribution with a set of Guided Tours for Community Builder!.

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Category: News

Published: 21 July 2023

Last Updated: 21 July 2023

Hits: 1423

CB Paid Subscriptions (CBSubs) 4.6.2 comes with major new features: Dynamic pricing with its CBSubs Options plugin, a massively improved Stripe payment gateway and a rewritten iDevAffiliate integration. The automated payment process has also been improved for rock solid checkouts.

CB Paid Subscriptions (CBSubs GPL) 4.6.2 is a features and maintenance release and is a recommended upgrade for all sites.

CBSubs 4.6.1 includes new dynamic pricing, an improved payment service provider gateway, 25 other improvements and 33 minor bug fixes. Main new items are:

• The CBSubs Options plugin has been massively improved to allow to modify plan prices easily. Support has been added for adjusting the base price of a plan dynamically, with or without options. For example, substitutions (e.g. [cb_quotedprice]) and modifiers (e.g. +10, -15, *3, +[cb_priceadjust]) are now possible. This avoids needing to use promotions to alter the base pricing of plans and also work great with pricing options since the base price is adjusted instead of the totalized price, and individual adjustments are not itemized in the invoice.
  The CBSubs Options plugin propose various duration and price possibilities for user subscription plans. It also allows to offer various options to membership subscriptions or to merchandise products. This allows to offer options to users while selecting their plan or product, and then to manage them right from their user profile. Kyle has a detailed blog with many screenshots about the CBSubs Options plugin
• Stripe payment gateway has been improved to better reflect the bought items at the Stripe portal, also for automatically recurring subscriptions payments. The stripe gateway has been rewritten to use the latest Stripe API Elements and became several improvements throughout. This makes Stripe easier to use, have more features, and more safety nets for potential payment failures. See Kyle's detailed blog about the Stripe payment gateway overhaul.
• CIC Credit Mutuel payment gateway uses the updated payment api
• iDevAffiliate integration has been redesigned to use whole basket pricing instead of per-item and to respect recurring payments pricing, adhering to their affiliates commissions structure.
• Settings to enable or disable unsubscribe buttons on plan by plan basis.

CBSubs 4.6.2 also fixes 33 minor bugs and improves the compatibility and reliability overall.

CBSubs 4.6.2 is a recommended upgrade for all sites, and is very stable, as all changes were released continuously in our nightly releases. It is also a highly recommended upgrade for sites using the Stripe and/or CIC Credit Mutuel payment processors.

CBSubs 4.6.2 requires latest Community Builder 2.8 release or later.

CBSubs 4.6.2 is fully compatible with Joomla 3.10-4.1, PHP 7.4-8.1 and MySQL 5.6-8.0.

CBSubs 4.6.2 is available in our Downloads section and simply requires an active subscription to CBSubs or a Developer membership.

Kyle's latest blog details the new CBSubs Options plugin.

Full changelog is available, and CBSubs 4.6.2 is also installed on our demo site. Last but not least, many thanks to Kyle for his redevelopment of the CBSubs Options plugin!

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Category: News

Published: 24 January 2023

Last Updated: 24 January 2023

Hits: 4186

Community Builder 2.8 can be freely downloaded by all registered members

We just released a new features-release of Community Builder 2.8, with 12 new features and 14 bug fixes.

CB 2.8 is compatible with Joomla 4 (latest is 4.2.6) and Joomla 3.10 (latest is 3.10.11), as well as with all our CB add-ons.

The main highlights of this release (since previous CB 2.7.4 release) are:

• New "Joomla custom user field" CB-field-type allows to use core Joomla custom user fields from the Joomla native user component within Community Builder! This feature is only available on Joomla 4 and is not available on Joomla 3.10. This allows to use Joomla's core user-fields functionality, as well as that of many Joomla core field-types extensions (JED link) in Community Builder. Please test third party extensions first on your test site, we do not test against third party field types!
• Implemented support for custom layouts in registration, user profile and user edit views, allowing to fully personalize all these Community Builder views. 3 standard layout types are provided for Canvas (home, own profile), Canvas (other, other user profile), Intranet (a sober layout), as well as a custom layout type, allowing to input your own HTML layout.
  IMPORTANT: All existing layout parameters are migrated from CB Configuration into their own parameters that you will find again under a new Layout tab in the default template under Plugins management, together with many new layout possibilities. If you use third-party CB templates, migration should happen there too, but please check as we can't test against third party and custom CB templates.
• See Kyle's blog about profile layouts, Joomla fields and more for details and examples!

Other CB 2.8 highlights include:

• Support for new browser-native fields in the corresponding CB fields such as native date, native date-time, time and range-based integer. This setting is optional within CB date and integer field types, so that existing sites are not changed. See Kyle's blog about date/time fields and about browser native range sliders for CB integer fields.
• A new CB substitution has been added for substituting translation strings, allowing to use CB translations anywhere where substitutions are supported.
• Now CB substitutions also implement IF conditions based on the page URL, including menu Id, parameters and location. See Kyle's blog about location based substitutions as well as the URL IF conditions feature request for details.
• Improved consistence with Joomla behaviors by using Joomla's mail and anti-spoofing functions instead of CB's own ones
• Thanks to upgrading the required minimum PHP version to 7.4 in CB 2.7, a major code overhaul has been done for CB core fields and tabs
• Minimum system requirements are now still: Joomla 3.10+ or 4.0+, PHP 7.4+, and MYSQL 5.6+ (or MariaDB 10.x), like implemented already in CB 2.7 release 11 months ago and as announced since CB 2.6.0 release, 20 months ago.
• 14 minor bug fixes.

Details can be found in the full CB 2.8 changelog.

Community Builder 2.8 is a highly recommended upgrade for all CB sites on Joomla 3.10 and 4.x. CB 2.8's new features have been gradually released to our community in our nightly releases, so they are considered to be stable and proven in the field, and your upgrade should run smoothly. Nevertheless, we can't repeat it enough, as usual with any software upgrade, backup first.

Our demo website has already been updated to Community Builder 2.8, so you can see it in action along will all our Joomlapolis add-ons.

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Category: News

Published: 31 August 2022

Last Updated: 31 August 2022

Hits: 3131

Joomla 4.2.0, 4.2.1 and 3.10.11 are here!

Joomla 4.2.0 and Joomla 3.10.11 have been released 2 weeks ago, and Joomla 4.2.1 has been released yesterday.

Joomla 4.2 is a features release, which landed on schedule, is a smooth upgrade.

Joomla 4.2 includes many new features and usability improvements and a few bug-fixes. Main new features are:

• Keyboard shortcuts in the administration:
  • With the new keyboard shortcuts, you can save time and become more productive. The shortcuts are, of course also accessible, like the rest of the barriers-free Joomla 4 administration interface. Barriers-free accessibility in front-end and in administration is a major feature of Joomla 4, where it shines.
• Multi-factor Authentication (replaces Two-Factor Authentication):
  • Joomla's new ‘Multi-factor’ Authentication is taking site access security one step further by allowing you to choose different authentication mechanisms to secure your site. You can choose to use Web Authentication, a verification code, a code by email, or Yubi-key.
  • With Multi-factor Authentication, you first log in with your username and password. After that, you are presented with another screen to enter your second authentication method.
• Windows Hello support in Web Authentication
• Many other nice new features and usability improvements.

Joomla 4.2.1 is a maintenance release which includes around 20 minor improvements and a minor security improvement (low severity - low impact).

Joomla 3.10.11 has an external library update removing a PHP 8.1 deprecation warning, and a certificate authorities CA-file update.

Joomla 3.10 will continue to be supported with security fixes until (at least) 17th August 2023, giving you plenty of time to plan your mini-migration to Joomla 4 and update your extensions (if required) to become Joomla 4 compatible versions. Community Builder and all its add-ons are already compatible with as well Joomla 3.10 as with Joomla 4, making the mini-migration from Joomla 3.10 to Joomla 4 much easier (upgrade Community Builder and your add-ons to latest builds, then start your mini-migration.

Joomla 4.2.1 and 3.10.11 are recommended updates for their respective versions. If you use two-factor authentication, we recommend to test your two-factor authentication setup on a clone of your site before upgrading your site. In all cases, as usual, backup your site before upgrading.

Community Builder 2.7.2 latest build and all Joomlapolis add-ons run just fine on these solid new Joomla releases.

Joomla is currently the most accessible CMS available. Joomla 4.2.1 is the best Joomla release ever, a solid and mature product powering millions of websites. To the difference of most other CMSes, its code-base is clean and solid, and from ground up secure.

To help you discover or present Joomla to your friends or customers, the Joomla marketing team has prepared a Joomla 4 brochure, in 15 languages, that you can download here.

You can learn more about these new features by reading the Joomla 4.2 and 3.10.11 announcement and the Joomla 4.2.1 announcement.