Bootstrap 4 and Fontawesome 5

Bootstrap 4 and Fontawesome 5

Just an update on this. Looks like we're still on schedule. CB Activity 4.2.1 released and CB Auto Actions 7.2.0 should be ready for next week followed by PHP 7.2 testing and fixes.

A build release for CB Auto Actions 7.2.0 has already been released as of today and contains some new improvements for activity grouping. Activity grouping allows the assets of 1 activity to be attached to another activity. What this prevents is storing tons of activity for same/similar activity. Currently if you upload 100 photos in CB Gallery that's 100 activity entries. With this new grouping feature it now generates 1 activity entry and attaches the other 99 would-be activity assets to it. CB Gallery can then parse those out fine. This requires latest builds for CB Activity, CB Auto Actions, and CB Gallery to utilize, but you should see performance gains going forward where gallery activity is involved.

Looks like there was only 3-4 PHP 7.2 compatibility fixes needed. We should have a build out hopefully sometime this week with those fixes. If anyone finds any issues once released please be sure to let us know.

This is also a heads up. With CB 2.2 (Bootstrap 4 and Fontawesome 5 upgrade) release we will be pushing the minimum PHP version required for CB to 5.6. This is to allow us to better support PHP 7 while still maintaining support for Joomla 3 (which will go EOL by 2020) giving us time to eventually move our minimum supported PHP version to 7.2 or higher (depends, we've got roughly 2 years to do all that) for CB 3.0 (major major rework of all our API!).

In short I HIGHLY recommend upgrading to PHP 7.1 if available and once this build is out do upgrade to PHP 7.2. The performance different is absolutely noticeable. If your host does not offer PHP 7 yet I suggest contacting them on a timeframe as to when it'll be available or consider switching hosts.

Another progress update. CB Gallery is progressing well. Changed version from 2.1.1 to 2.2. Also some very good news regarding client side resizing. Previously if an image had EXIF orientation (e.g. usually photos taken with mobile device) it was ignored when using client side resizing so you had to disable such a huge performance improvement for images to properly rotate. This is no longer an issue as have implement EXIF orientation parsing in the client side resizing. This is available now in the latest build.

In addition to EXIF orientation there is now jQuery validation for muti-uploads. This prevents POST to your server when the upload would for sure fail validation. This saves resources and gives instant feedback to the user. Additionally the maximum upload size could also be set to be higher than your PHP limits would even allow. It will not properly adjust the maximum upload limit to take into account PHP limits (and use those for multi-upload validation).

Minor slow down in progress. CB Gallery 2.2.0 should be out next week. Had some delay as was working on our build script responsible for building releases for us automatically; we're making some improvements to it so we can push releases with less delay from our end.

Just another update. Everything is progressing well. With GJ released we just have a new CB release to do. I'm already working on the Bootstrap 4 upgrade. I'm looking at it taking probably at least 2 months as I have to unfortunately rewrite literally all of our styling, lol.

With all the new classes available in Bootstrap 4 CB won't have to utilize as much custom CSS allowing even deeper integration with your Joomla templates (if using Bootstrap 4).

We'll likely go ahead with a Beta release once it's ready as there WILL be styling conflicts that need to be addressed as they are found. I will be testing on Joomla 3.x default protostar ONLY and conflicts will be resolved for it alone until Joomla 4 where I will do same for J4 default template.

Please don't be surprised to see slowed releases during this time. I've to switch back and forth on repository branches every day to handle support for stable releases and develop this at the same time so it's a bit of work constantly going back and forth. I'll likely only be pushing bug fix releases with little to no feature releases during this time. It just depends on the urgency mostly.