Joomla 1.7: Proposed New Features and Patches

June 2nd, 2011 at 4:40 PM CEST in Joomla 1.7

According to the Joomla! Development Strategy Joomla 1.7 should be released on the 10th of July. As stated by Production Leadership Team (PLT) member Mark Dexter, developers had until June 1st (yesterday) to submit their code to be included in Joomla 1.7. Currently there are 25 items in the Joomla 1.7 feature tracker that have the status 'Pending', 4 'Ready for review' and 1 'Accepted'. Based on the items in feature tracker, I will highlight several of the new features and patches that might be included in Joomla 1.7.

Image credits: grongar

Pending

• Captcha in the core
  This captcha should be extensible by plugins, has support for ReCaptcha and SecurImage and can deal with both TTF and GD fonts.
• unloadScript and unloadStyleSheet
  This new feature allows you to remove script files and style sheets that were added earlier. This function could be useful in code that merges scripts and style sheets together for performance reasons or to be used in modules to unload (perhaps older versions of) libraries that were included by other developers.
• Mass Mail - exclude disabled user
  Creates a new check box that allows you to choose if disabled users will be included or excluded from receiving mass email.
• First and Last CSS class on mod_menu
  A class 'first' and a class 'last' will be added to respectively the first and last child of a menu. These classes will be added because the selectors :first-child and :last-child aren't working in all (legacy) browsers.
• Character Count JavaScript for Description Meta Tag
  Because most search engines limit the amount of characters shown in their snippets, it can be valuable to know how many characters your current meta description is.
• Patch to enable change of newsfeed display direction
  This patch adds the option to choose the direction of the news feed as either 'old to new' or 'new to old'.
• Infinite links in com_contacts
  This patch removes the limit of 5 links that can be added to a contact.
• Add onBeforeRedirect hook to core
  Allows debug plugins to catch the debug output which is lost on a redirect.
• Maximum login attempts for Joomla authentication plugin
  Set a maximum value for login attempts and the amount of time a user has to wait before he can try again. Useful to slow down brute force attacks.
• Enable client-side JavaScript debugging like in J1.5
  This patch adds a separate debug flag enabling client-side JavaScript debugging by sending uncompressed scripts.
• Direct menu item alias
  Provides an option to exclude the aliases of the parent of a menu item from the URL of a full menu item alias.
• Installer can select from multiple manifest files
  Enables extensions developers to change parts of their program across versions, but still have only one file for people to install.
• Detect a BOM in configuration.php
  Raises a warning when a UTF-8 Byte Order Mark (BOM) is found in the configuration.php file.

Ready for review

• Update TinyMCE to version 3.4
  The content editor TinyMCE was updated to the latest version, which includes several bug fixes and new features.
• Mod_custom with backgroundimages
  Adds the ability to add background image to custom modules.
• Improve the installation
  Adds more AJAX functionality to the installation and also eliminates some markup and quite a few images by using CSS3 border-radius.
• JToolBarHelper functions for Save and Create New and Save as Copy
  Adds save2new and save2copy functions to the toolbar code.

Accepted

• Allow pre-selection of categories in com_content
  A patch that extends the standard com_content view "Create Article" with a parameter, which allows for the selection of default categories - and can alternatively be provided in the url.

Go to the Joomla 1.7 feature tracker and help to test the new features and patches!