ZOO 2.1 final – Frontend submission is available for the public

Sascha
September 27, 2010
ZOO

Today we are really excited to announce the release of the stable version ZOO 2.1! A big thank you to all of our BETA testers! ZOO 2.1 is now available to the public for free. The new release is all about the most wanted feature for ZOO: Frontend Submission! But there is more, a long list of new features awaits to attract your attention. This blog post will walk you through the new features. This helps you to explore all the new things we've implemented in ZOO 2.1. Take a break and enjoy the read:

Frontend Submission and Editing

The ZOO 2.1 Frontend Submission blog post already covered the number one ZOO 2.1 feature extensively. But here is a quick roundup.

The brand new frontend submission for ZOO allows you to create submissions for any content type of your ZOO apps. For example authors can submit articles or the latest movie reviews. It can also be used as a form builder for any kind of form, e.g. a contact form. You can easily customize what content is submittable by drag 'n drop. Not only submissions by registered users even public submissions are possible. We have a beautiful submission interface and a new, polished ZOO administration area. A "My Submissions" view enables your users to review and edit their submitted items again. To achieve frontend editing for items we introduced the "Trusted Mode". For non trusted users a new feature that made it into the final version is the spam protection. Users are only allowed to post every five minutes in none trusted mode. This removes the threat of being spammed by submissions. Take a look at the ZOO 2.1 Frontend Submission blog post to learn more about all the details.

New Importers

With our ZOO 2.1 release, we have not only updated the K2 and Joomla importers, but we have also included two brand new importers. You can now import data from Docman and Mosets Tree. This will make it much easier for you, to give ZOO a try. Simply install ZOO, import data from your existing installation and take ZOO for a spin. ZOO is not to your taste? Uninstall it, no harm done. That's not going to happen though, right ;-)

But there is more - much anticipated was the release of our CSV importer. Now, you can basically import data from any program supporting CSV export. That's really neat, right? Your customer wants a rework of its old website running a different CMS? You can now migrate data from the old website to your new ZOO installation.

CSV Importer

Here is how it works. Basically you can import any number of items and any number of data columns into the following ZOO elements: Text, Textarea, Link, Email, Date, Image and Download. Now that's what you would expect anyway, right? But you can also import those items into existing or none existing categories. You simply assign one or more columns to the category field and the importer will try to match the categories name to existing categories. If there is no category with this name, it will automatically be created. Do you have data that needs to be stored in a repeatable element? You can accomplish this by assigning multiple columns to the same element. The importer will handle the data in the order of the columns.

One of the highlights of the new ZOO 2.1 is the link handling. We have included a new router to help with building links. It will search the Joomla menu and figure out which Menu Item to activate. Also, if you browse through your categories it will now remember the category you came from in the breadcrumbs. If you visit the item from a direct link, the new primary category will be shown in the breadcrumb.

Canonical Links (SEO)

In Joomla, we've always had problems with multiple links linking to the same content (Duplicate Content). We've got rid of those problems by introducing canonical links now. Each item has a canonical link in the page header, that hints search engines to the original resource. Therefore, the canonical link is the link returned by the search result. It consolidates those multiple links to your preferred version and hereby increases your link popularity.

Updated Google Maps Element

We have updated the Google Maps API to version 3. It's not only way better looking, but you can also get rid of those API Keys. That's right. The days when it would cause a problem to upload your website from a local installation to your web server are over.

New Facebook Like Element

Everybody knows them by now - Facebook's Like Buttons. We have built an element, which lets you integrate those buttons into your ZOO items. Now your users can inform everybody else on the fact that they like your content.

Print element

There is a new core element in town. By popular demand we introduce the print element. The print element lets your users print the item without the bloat of the Joomla site.

Language files

While ZOO 2.0 is available in 19 different languages we are confident that our community will help us to translate the additional entries for ZOO 2.1. We received a bunch of new language files for ZOO 2.1. A big “Thank You” goes out to all the busy translators! So ZOO 2.1 is already available in English, German, French, Portuguese, Czech, Italian and Serbian. If you want to help us to translate ZOO 2.1 for all the other languages download this file, translate it and send it back to us. Thanks for your help!

How to upgrade ZOO 2.0 to 2.1

You can simply install the new ZOO 2.1 over your old ZOO 2.0.x. Isn't this awesome? But first make a backup of your old site (files and database), so you can recover it any time. If you do the update process, you'll have to reassign submittable elements to the submission layout. Take a look at this tutorial how to do so.

What's next?

The next ZOO 2.2 will feature an update of the Mootools library to version 1.2. We'll update all of our Javascripts to run with Mootools 1.2. This will alleviate some problems we are currently facing with the Internet Explorer and our newest templates. As this is a smaller update a release will come very soon.

Grab your own copy of ZOO 2.1 and take it for a spin.