YOOtheme Pro 2.6 – Joomla 4 Support and WooCommerce Integration
Congratulations to the Joomla team! Joomla 4 has finally arrived. It's a huge upgrade packed with many new features and functionalities. And starting from today YOOtheme Pro is available for Joomla 4! But that's not all, YOOtheme Pro 2.6 also comes with further WooCommerce integration. Let's get started!
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Joomla 4 Support
Finally, the new major version of Joomla is here. Joomla 4 has been completely redesigned, rethought and of course supplemented with new features. Making YOOtheme Pro ready for Joomla 4 was more of a long term task. Since its first beta releases we started adjusting different parts of YOOtheme Pro to make the final implementation as smooth as possible. And today with YOOtheme Pro 2.6 you can upgrade to Joomla 4 with just a click. Everything in YOOtheme Pro will work like a charm.
A small disclaimer at this point, Joomla 4 is a major upgrade, which is why you should take the usual precautions. Most importantly, make a backup of your site and make sure all your plugins and extensions are ready for Joomla 4. Better safe than sorry, right? 😉
Subform Field in Joomla 4
One thing we are personally most excited about is the new subform custom field. The old repeatable field was bugging us for quite some time when building dynamic content themes. Unlike the repeatable field which had very limited sub fields, the new subform field can group any existing field types, for example the YOOtheme Pro location field, and make them repeatable. This gives you more flexibility when working with dynamic content.
After the upgrade to Joomla 4, all existing repeatable fields are automatically converted to the new subform field. And of course, YOOtheme Pro will update field mappings in your builder layouts accordingly.
Bootstrap 5 in Joomla 4
Joomla 4 ships with the Bootstrap 5 CSS framework and uses it in all its templates. In YOOtheme Pro, as you all know, everything is built with our own front-end framework UIkit. This means Bootstrap is only needed when default Joomla template files are loaded, for example for the Joomla frontend editing. That's why we built a Bootstrap 5 Less UIkit adaptor. It applies the UIkit style chosen in the style customizer to the Bootstrap CSS. This way the pages which are using Bootstrap will look similar to the rest of your site.
Additionally, we added a new option to prevent Bootstrap from loading altogether. It will make your site load much faster and is recommended if you have no pages which require Bootstrap. The option can be found in the advanced settings in YOOtheme Pro and is also available for Joomla 3.
That's all for Joomla 4, now let's see what else we have for WooCommerce.
WooCommerce 3rd Party Plugins Support
We've tested some of the most common WooCommerce plugins and improved their integration into YOOtheme Pro. Now plugins which render their content before or after specific product details work out of the box. Additionally, we took a closer look at some advanced filtering and search plugins for the WooCommerce shop page and created short tutorials for their integration.
So now all WooCommerce plugins we've tested run smoothly. But if there is still an issue with one of your WooCommerce plugins, please let us know. We take this seriously and really want to make YOOtheme Pro the best WooCommerce builder around.
12 WooCommerce Documentation Videos
We've created a comprehensive WooCommerce documentation for YOOtheme Pro which includes 12 documentation videos showing you every detail of the WooCommerce integration. Learn how to create builder layouts for all WooCommerce pages, use the new WooCommerce builder elements, map WooCommerce fields with dynamic content and style the WooCommerce shop. Of course, they are all available in the contextual help system of YOOtheme Pro.
Further Improvements
YOOtheme Pro 2.6 comes with some further smaller improvements and fixes. Joomla modules and menu items are no longer checked-out after being edited in the YOOtheme Pro customizer, menu item classes are now set correctly in the markup, and we're now using the default WordPress naming convention for widget ids and classes. For the full list of features and fixes, check out the changelog.
Next Steps
YOOtheme Pro 2.6 brings support for the long-awaited Joomla 4 and further improves the WooCommerce integration. But we are not done with Joomla 4 yet. Widgetkit 3 support for Joomla 4 is already waiting in the wings, and we are looking into ZOO 4. And that's not all, you can look forward to not one but two feature releases for YOOtheme Pro soon, and there are also a couple of theme packages in the making.
Now go ahead and update to YOOtheme Pro 2.6. As always, we are looking forward to your feedback, so let us know what you think in the comments below.
Update (9 September)
Mind that our dynamic theme packages make use of the Articles Field from Regular Labs for which Joomla 4 support is expected not before early 2022. If you would like to upgrade your site to Joomla 4 earlier, you can use the new YOOtheme Pro related articles field, but it will require some work. Instead of picking articles manually, you could relate them using categories or tags.
