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Category: News

Published: 30 March 2022

Last Updated: 31 March 2022

Hits: 2712

Joomla 4.1.2 and Joomla 3.10.8 are here!

The Joomla! Project is ticking like a Swiss watch and agile like a leopard!

Right on schedule, Joomla 4.1.2 and Joomla 3.10.8 have been just released, 6 weeks after Joomla 4.1 and 3.0.6!

Both are security and maintenance releases for previous Joomla <4.1.1 and <3.10.7 releases.

It is delighting to see Joomla picking up momentum and confirming its dependability and agility.

With Joomla 4.2 alpha 1 around the corner, the future is bright. Kudos to the Joomla Production and Security Strike Teams (of which our Beat is also member)!

Joomla 4.1.2 includes 7 low level security vulnerabilities fixes (see full announcement below for security details) and addresses several bugs and improvements:

• Language strings behaviour fix in TinyMCE
• Fix switch for syntax highlighting in TinyMCE
• Show failed tasks in scheduler
• Correct usage of parameters of Jooa11y integrated accessibility and quality assurance tool
• Codemirror HTML text editor enhancements
• Several PHP 8.1 improvements (some contributed by Beat)

Joomla 3.10.8 contains 5 low level security vulnerabilities fixes (see full announcement below for security details) and several bugfixes and welcome improvements:

• Backport JQuery UI security patch for CVE-2021-41184 (Joomla core, CB and our add-ons were not affected)
• Disable Google Fonts setting for new Joomla 3.10.7+ installations only
• [Regression] Fixes redirect values updating automatically unintentionally changed
• Removes FLoC setting as FLoC has been abandoned
• E-Mail Cloak: TLDs longer than 10 are no longer truncated
• Privacy Consent wording clarifiaction: I agree/No reply is now: I agree / I do not agree.

As previously mentioned, both Joomla 4.1.2 and 3.10.8 are security releases and highly recommended upgrades. If you are still on Joomla 3.9 or below, or 4.0, it is time to upgrade to Joomla 3.10.8 and 4.1.2, both versions being smooth upgrades for their respective series.

Community Builder 2.7.2 and all Joomlapolis add-ons run just fine on all of these new Joomla releases.

You can learn more about these new features by reading the Joomla 4.1.2/3.10.8 announcement.

You may ask: what happened to 4.1.1 and 3.10.7? A few hours after release a last-minute regression for a small minority of websites using alternate authentication plugins for logins has been reported. The 4.1.1 and 3.10.7 releases got quickly removed from the updates servers, the Joomla team worked hard to fix the issue, and a few hours later Joomla 4.1.2 and Joomla 3.10.8 have been released without the corresponding change, thus fixing this regression in a safe way! Community Builder is using Joomla's standard APIs, and was thus not affected by this regression of Joomla 4.1.1 and 3.10.7.

A few personal words about the 4.1.1 and 3.10.7 short-lived Joomla releases: Bugs and mistakes can happen in great teams. But what sets aside an awesome team, like Joomla, from a great team is how mishaps are handled. Joomla has quickly and openly acknowledged its bug, and swiftly fixed the issue, provided a FAQ to help the very few people that got affected by the regression bug. Additionally, discussions are looking into how to improve the processes. While very few loose time pointing fingers or laughing, we can only say: Kudos Joomla! Team! and then continue moving ahead full speed on our next CB Paid Subscriptions release 4.6 which should come soon, with a nice surprise included!

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Category: News

Published: 01 March 2022

Last Updated: 03 March 2022

Hits: 2657

Community Builder 2.7.2 can be freely downloaded by all registered members

We just released Community Builder 2.7.2, with 8 improvements and 8 bug fixes.

CB 2.7 is compatible with Joomla 4.1.0 and Joomla 3.10.6. It fixes a small bug when editing of Joomla user parameters with new Joomla 4.1.0.

Community Builder 2.7.2 starts leveraging the new PHP 7.4 prerequisite. This allows us to upgrade included third-party open-source libraries, starting with the Guzzle library used for HTTP/HTTPS accesses, in CB for version checks and upgrades, and by CB add-ons. Guzzle received a big boost from version 4 (the last one that was PHP 5.6-compatible) to latest version 7 thanks to the new prerequisites. We could also update Bootstrap to latest Bootstrap 4 version and have minified CSS core files.

Finally, we added to the user management a batch task to mass-set or reset the user status requiring a password-change. This is useful to automatically ask users to change their password on next login.

The new features of this release are:

• Added full support for Joomla 4.1.0
• New batch button to mass-set or reset user-password-change-request status.
• Additional e-mail fields validation option
• Minified core CSS files
• Updated Bootstrap to latest Bootstrap 4 release
• Updated HTTP/S fetching library from Guzzle 4 to Guzzle 7.
• Reminder: Minimum system requirements are now: Joomla 3.10+, PHP 7.4+, and MYSQL 5.6+ (or MariaDB 10.x), as announced since CB 2.6.0 release, 10 months ago.

Our full CB 2.7.2 changelog is available for details.

Community Builder 2.7.2 is a recommended upgrade for all CB sites on Joomla 3.10.x and 4.0.x and highly recommended for Joomla 4.1 sites.

Our demo website has already been updated to Community Builder 2.7.2, so you can see it in action along will all our Joomlapolis add-ons.

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Category: News

Published: 16 February 2022

Last Updated: 16 February 2022

Hits: 3264

Joomla 4.1 is here!

The Joomla! Project is thrilled to announce the features-packed and timely release of Joomla 4.1.

Joomla 4.1 brings new features for bloggers and authors, web designers and extension developers, web agencies or multinationals. The highlights are:

• Tasks Scheduler to automate your periodic tasks, e.g. to trigger a CB Auto Action.
• Child Templates allow to fine-tune your templates, and still be able to keep the template updated.
• Accessibility Checker checks your article's accessibility with a click near the Preview button
• Syntax Highlighting in the integrated editor brings clarity to your HTML source view
• Inline Help displays at the click of the Toggle Help button in the Joomla Configuration
• PHP 8.1 compatibility

This release sets new standards in accessible web design and brings exciting new features, highlighting Joomla's values of inclusiveness, simplicity and security into an even more powerful open-source web platform.

In addition to Joomla 4.1, the project team has also released Joomla 3.10.6, which mainly brings PHP 8.1 compatibilty.

Beat has contributed to Joomla 4.1 and 3.10.6 with  PHP 8.1 compatibility (with actually half of Joomla 3.10.6's pull requests, which were also applied to Joomla 4.1.

Community Builder 2.7.1 (and latest nightly build for Joomla 4.1) and all Joomlapolis add-ons run just fine on these new Joomla releases.

You can learn more about these new features by reading the Joomla 4.1/3.10.6 announcement, and for the accessibility checker, visit the Jooa11y accessibility checker micro-site with more details about this exciting new feature and many examples.

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Category: News

Published: 11 February 2022

Last Updated: 11 February 2022

Hits: 4983

Community Builder 2.7 can be freely downloaded by all registered members

We just released Community Builder 2.7, with 9 improvements and 9 bug fixes.

CB 2.7 is compatible with Joomla 4.0.6 and Joomla 3.10.5.

The main highlights of this release are:

• PHP 8.1 support
• User imports are significantly improved to give a front-end-registration-like process, with a new option to not send emails during import.
• Removal of Joomla 2.5 support
• Minimum system requirements are now: Joomla 3.10+, PHP 7.4+, and MYSQL 5.6+ (or MariaDB 10.x), as announced since CB 2.6.0 release, 9 months ago.
• CB 2.7.1 fixes the pre-install check of CB 2.7.0 for sites with MariaDB 10.x database server.

Details can be found in the full CB 2.7 changelog and CB 2.7.1 changelog.

Community Builder 2.7/2.7.1 is a highly recommended upgrade for all CB sites on Joomla 3.x and 4.0.x.

Some comments directly from Beat:

• It's voluntarily a minor upgrade in terms of features, so it's an easy and safe upgrade for users.
• It's safely checking for PHP and MySQL requirements before upgrade.
• The new PHP 7.4 and Joomla 3.10 prerequisites are a huge step forward from PHP 5.6 and Joomla 2.5.
• CB 2.7 removes a lot of legacy compatibility code and lays modern grounds for substantial improvements in the core and add-ons, next 2.7.x releases will be using new PHP 7.0-7.4 features.
• Finally CB 2.7 brings full PHP 8.1 compatibility (with the just around the corner Joomla 4.1 or 3.10.6).
• Note: Joomla 3.10.5 and 4.0.6 are not yet fully PHP 8.1 compatible, but next week's Joomla 3.10.6 and 4.1 will be (btw I contributed a series of PRs to Joomla to make that happen, and all got accepted and merged!)

Our demo website has already been updated to Community Builder 2.7, so you can see it in action along will all our Joomlapolis add-ons.

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Category: News

Published: 03 February 2022

Last Updated: 03 February 2022

Hits: 2715

Joomla 4.1 RC2 released!

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of the second Joomla 4.1 Release Candidate for testing and it anticipates to release Joomla 4.1 stable around the 15th of February!

Joomla 4.1 features include:

• Accessibility improvement, language support within articles
• Better support for code highlighting in TinyMCE editor
• Enhancement of the Media Manager Web Service
• Child templates
• Task Scheduler (Web cron) for Joomla
• Accessibility Checker for authors

Joomla 4.1 RC2 is released for testing purposes.

Community Builder 2.6.4 (latest build) and all Joomlapolis add-ons seem to work just fine with Joomla 4.1 RC2 (internal testing in progress).

You can learn more about Joomla 4.1 RC2 and Joomla 4.1 stable plans by reading the Joomla 4.1 RC2 announcement.