ZOO 2.0 Beta 2 – Get it in the downloads section

Jan
April 14, 2010
ZOO

We have listened to your feedback, made quite a few changes and are now proud to present the BETA2 release of the ZOO 2.0. There are not only bugfixes in the new release. We have also included a bunch of improvements and new modules. As with the last release, you can head over to the download section, grab your own copy and take it for a spin.

Take a look at the highlights, the changes and all the bugfixes:

New Pages App

We have included a pages application. Its purpose is to display static content, much like the standard Joomla article. For example if you want to create a simple static page, to display your team members addresses, than use the new Pages application.

Updated ZOO Item Module

For the BETA2 release we polished the ZOO Item Module. It already had its own layout to place elements using Drag ‘n Drop! This way you can display any kind of item and its elements from any app. With the new release we introduce “Themes” to the ZOO Item Module. You can easily create your own themes and copy them to the themes folder. They will be loaded without modifying any other file. Cool, eh? We've already included a vertical and a horizontal list theme. We added new options to select items which should be displayed in the module. You can select a specific item manually, or you can select items by category or type. We also added a new “Random” order option to display items randomly. Last but not least you can define which menu item should be active after clicking on the link to the displayed item.

New ZOO Comment Module

We created a new ZOO Comment Module to display the latest comments. It also makes use of the new “Themes”, we introduced with the ZOO Item Module. We included a vertical and a horizontal list theme. But we also added three additional themes with the great speech bubble style, which we used in our Enterprise template for the YOOtweet module. We added some nice option to give you more control over which comments and what elements like the avatar or the name should be displayed.

New ZOO Tag Module

The third new module is the ZOO Tag Module. It allows you to display all the tags of your items. It also makes use of the “Themes” we introduced. We added an unordered and ordered list theme as well as a fancy tag cloud theme. The tags link to the tag view of the specific app you have chosen.

Editors

We have added application wide use of TinyMCE editors in the ZOO administration panel. This way you can have text editors on all your textareas. We've even exchanged the image button to use the joomla image chooser. You end up with a slick and easy to use editor.

Custom elements

You can now create your own custom elements. Each application folder gets its own elements folder. Custom elements can be added here. Simply inherit your element class from the Element or ElementRepeatable class and code away. Have a look at the elements folder in the backend of the zoo component, to see what you need to get you started.

Slug Unicode support

We have added support for unicode characters (cyrillic, arabic, ...) in slugs.

Export / Import

Category and frontpage params will now be exported and imported.

Further changes and bugfixes

added caching functionality for comment authors
moved download name to display options
template positions will be copied on type copy
frontpage will be in-/exported
layout not found error, will cause warning instead of error 500
only items that are categorized will be shown in alpha index
Backend -> Manager -> Types: Module and Plugin Name will be displayed properly
PHP 4 warning now functions as expected
fixed the output of special characters in text and textarea fields
vertical tabs are being filtered from CData areas in xml
image element: added file exist check
bugfixes to import/export
fixed some tooltips in Joomla administration panel
bugfixes to install application
bugfixes to comments
bugfix in type delete
fixed bug where related items would be shown, even though published down

These are not all the changes that were made to the code, but they give you quite a good impression, of what has happened since the last beta release. Accompanying this release, there is an update of the ZOO 1.0 to version 1.0.9. It improves the export functionality.