ZOO 2.0 – Frequently Asked Questions
In the comments of our latest blog posts and on Twitter, we recently noticed some questions about ZOO 2.0 that were being asked more than others. There seems to be a lot of confusion if some demanded features will make it into ZOO 2.0 or not. Our latest posts are about the new architecture of ZOO 2.0 and all new features we developed. But of course we want to answer all your questions and clarify the features of ZOO 2.0.
What about Frontend Submission?
Update: ZOO 2.1 BETA is available with frontend submission and editing. Read more here.
The most demanded feature is frontend submission. But there are some misunderstandings about what frontend submission really is. Some are asking for frontend submission, some for frontend editing, some for frontend capabilities and so on. For us there is a big difference between user submissions and frontend access to the ZOO administration panel. The demand of administration through the frontend is caused by the need of a better permission management for Joomla. For example website administrators just don’t want to allow their customers to access the Joomla backend. Joomla 1.6 will solve this problem. It will have a completely reworked ACL system which looks very promising. Of course ZOO will make use of it as soon as Joomla 1.6 is released. Because of this, we have no plans for frontend administration for ZOO. Frontend submission on the other hand allows non-registered users to submit items. For example blog articles could be submitted or new files could be added to a download archive. Frontend submission is a more complex feature than frontend administration. You have to validate all submissions because user submissions cannot be trusted like submissions from administrators. We have a lot of ideas for the frontend submission, and it is on top of our todo list. But for ZOO 2.0 we had to focus on the new architecture and all the basic stuff. We are very happy how everything worked out with the ZOO 2.0 development and after the release we will look forward to implementing features like frontend submission. Currently, we are not sure if it will make it in ZOO 2.1 or 2.2, but it has high priority. We are aiming for short release cycles for the next versions, and it will not take long before we start the development.
What about multilingual content?
Currently, Joomla offers no support for multilingual content. There are great extensions available to solve this problem like Nooku Content and Joomfish. In most cases these solutions work but for a complex content management extension like ZOO with CCK features it is a very difficult task - Not simply to make everything translatable but also to have a great usability, which is very important to us. To make a long story short, it is currently no solution available which works 100%. But of course we will keep an eye on the progress of multilingual extensions and maybe work something out in the future.
What about the framework?
ZOO 2.0 does not make use of any other PHP frameworks than the Joomla framework. There is a simple answer to that. ZOO is and will be used by a large user base. And to keep conflicts small we don’t want any dependencies to more than one framework. Think about Mootools and JQuery. We would never use both at the same time. There should only be one. Don’t be concerned. We are pretty sure our code quality will meet your expectations ;-)
What’s next?
We hope that we could answer a lot of open questions about ZOO 2.0 and that you are looking forward to the release. The next blog post will again be about the new features.
