FLEXIContent 1.5.4 released

Faster page load

The most noticeable difference I saw after upgrading was in speed. The sites I've used FLEXIcontent in have been suffering from a slight delay in presenting the page. That delay is gone now, and the page is presented a lot faster than before. I haven't done too many speed tests, but just from browsing the pages I can tell they're much faster.

The front page of one of the sites went from Page Speed score 75/100 to 80/100 just by upgrading, while a category page with lots of images went from 78/100 to 79/100.

Many improvements

As they say: Sometning good is worth waiting for. FLEXIcontent 1.5.4 has a long list of improvements. Here is the list of the major new features of this new release:

Security :

• Phpthumb library vulnerabilty has been fixed.

• The forced chmod 777 on the phpthumb cache folder has been removed from the post-install check.

New fields

• Article toolbar : This field displays a toolbar with print, email, pdf, hear the text, comments, text-resizing and social bookmarking features. The toolbar is fully customizable.

• Page navigation : The page navigation field allows you to display a previous and next article button on the page. It supports multi mapping and you may exclude certain content types from the navigation.

• Load module : This field allows you to load a Joomla module instance or a complete position inside your content template. It gives you more flexibility in terms of design. Combined with the new category routing feature, you can for example create complex magazine views using a specific item type.

Improvement on existing fields

• Image : The alt attribute is automatically added if there is none

• Files : The file field and the fileselement views have been improved to see immediately which files have already been added.

• Select and Select multiple: You can choose to display the value or the text in frontend. This is very useful if you.

• All fields except, image, file and minigallery have now a required parameter so that you can make them mandatory when building your form.

Application routing :

Thanks to a new system plugin you can now:

• Route the category views to a specific item type: It allows for example to build complex magazine views thanks to modules combination. It allows you to tag your category views and to add fields as well.

• Exclude some categories from routing: This is the typical case of a category used as homepage view. With tis new feature, it won't appear in the item categories in frontend and will also avoid to obtain pathways like this : Homepage > My article

Performance :

• All unneeded queries have been removed from category views to improve performance.

• A template cache has been set to avoid parsing all templates xml files on each page load.

• Improvements on post-install check for websites with a lot of contents

SEO

• Reworked sh404 plugin to optimize the generated url on sh404 v2. Fully joomfish compatible and authorize the short url (PageId) creation. It allows also the creation of SEF url's for items who doesn't have a $cid parameter in the query string.

• New parameter on types and items to allows a rel canonical in the the document head in order to avoid duplicate contents with multimapping.

Multipage articles:

• FLEXIcontent is now able to manage the multi pages articles with. It supports the default pagebreak plugin and the overpagebreak plugin from Joomlaworks.

• Note: As theses plugins are designed to work with the default Joomla articles only, there is one line to modify in order to allow FLEXIcontent to trigger them.

The complete changelog is available on the FLEXIcontent download page.

Get FLEXIcontent 1.5.4 now!

Upcoming versions

FLEXIcontent 1.6.0 beta will be available soon. You can already download it for testing purposes on Google Code. Please do not use it in production!!!

FLEXIcontent 1.5.5 will be released in a few weeks and will include the FLEXIcontent universal module and some other improvements.