Today we cheerful announce the release of our ZOO 2.2 BETA. As promised this came after a very short development period. This post will mainly focus on the new features and capabilities that come along with using MooTools 1.2. We'll also look at some of the performance upgrades that are included with the new ZOO 2.2 BETA release.
We have also updated the ZOO to the Stable 2.1.2 version. It includes quite a few bugfixes.
Please give us a feedback and tell us what you think!
MooTools 1.2
The recently released version 1.5.20 Joomla adds support for using MooTools 1.2 as your primary Javascript library. Therefore Joomla now includes a new plugin called "mtupgrade" which will include MooTools version 1.2.4 instead of the old MooTools version 1.1.2. Of course the new MooTools 1.2 is more powerful and flexible and has also a better cross-browser code integration which results in less problems with the Internet Explorer. With ZOO 2.2 we included native Mootools 1.2 implementations of all the ZOO Javascripts!
So how do you benefit from MooTools 1.2 as a user? Simple, the new ZOO 2.2 will work better - across browsers and in general. The included JavaScripts are cleaner, thus smaller and faster. Also many modules and plugins in the Joomlasphere make heavy use of MooTools 1.2 already and therefore the days of conflicts with these are over. The new Warp 5.5 framework already includes native MooTools 1.2 implementations of all the template Javascripts! Further the framework auto-detects if your are using the MooTools upgrade plugin or not and will include the compatible scripts to match your MooTools version. Since the old ZOO wasn't able to work with MooTools 1.2 just yet, you couldn't enable the MooTools plugin and our latest templates couldn't benefit from it. Well, now you can!
For this new ZOO version you'll need Joomlas "mtupgrade" plugin to be enabled. Since not everybody will be able to do so right away, we'll keep the old ZOO 2.1.x out there for a while. This will give you time to adjust. We'll also keep fixing some bugs for the old ZOO 2.1.x, but we strongly suggest, that you upgrade to ZOO 2.2. The next major upgrades will build on ZOO 2.2.
Performance Upgrades
Basically it is this simple: The new ZOO 2.2 will run faster. On some occasions much, much, much faster. Until now, the ZOO wasn't the greatest workhorse to manage 50.000+ items ;-). You could sometimes wait quite a while if you had large collections of items and categories. Zoo is now able to handle 50.000+ items and 5.000+ categories efficiently. How did we achieve this? Mostly we refactored quite a few database queries and also, that's the key: we included more database indexes. Some queries run 10 times faster now. Other improvements include changes to the templates and some of the core code functions. We will continue to glance at performance tweaks in the next updates to come.
What's next?
The ZOO 2.2 BETA is exclusively available for members only who purchased the ZOO app bundle. As soon as ZOO 2.2 goes STABLE – hopefully next week already - it will be released for the public. Members can go straight to the download section in the member area and take ZOO 2.2 BETA for a spin! Be aware that it is a BETA version. It is not intended to be used on a production web site just yet.
We are already sorting through our todo list for features included with the next ZOO 2.3 release.
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