The Fabrik team is extremely proud to announce the release of Fabrik 2.0.3 for Joomla 1.5.

This is a major update from 2.0.2 with over 500 commits to the source code in the last 4 months.

Download Fabrik 2.0.3

General Improvements

Fabrik 2.0.3 is now fully tested and compatible with PHP 5.3

We have updated the JavaScript to work with mootools 1.2.4, which is available by activating Joomla's mootools upgrade system plug-in. Whilst Fabrik's JavaScript is still compatible with mootools 1.1 we recommend users to use mootools 1.2.4

The markup generated by Fabrik has been incrementally improved, ensuring that where possible it produces valid HTML

With some of the newer parts of our JavaScript code (notably the auto-completer and date picker), we have started to use the window as a mediator. This means our code will fire events at the window, which your custom JavaScript code can easily pick up, just like you would do when capturing a mouse click.For example when a user makes a selection from the auto-completer class it will fire this event, passing itself as a parameter:

window.fireEvent('fabrik.autocomplete.selection', this);

which your custom code can hook into with this mootools javascript:

window.addEvent('fabrik.autocomplete.selection', function(autocomplete){
  alert(autocompleter.element.value);
});

So far we are firing the following events:

The sh404sef plug-in has been improved and a new parameters section for controlling it can be found in Backend > Components > Fabrik > Tables --> [Parameters] (top-right button) , and also on a per menu-item basis

Elements

Something a lot of people have been asking for is to be able to do calculations on the fly within a form, The calculation element now has this ability, applying its calculations via Ajax, allowing the results to be updated on your form as users enter data

The google map element now has the option to use a variety of geoAPI sources to determine the users location and use that as its default location

The digg & rating elements now work when JavaScript is turned off

A lot of additional work has gone into the file upload element's amazon storage options, we've added 3 new locations  (APAC (Singapore) and USA West(Northern California)) and have added support for serving s3 files over https. The file upload element can now also create PDF thumbnails of your uploaded files (imageMagick is required to be installed on your server for this feature).

The date element can now have various dates blocked from being selected. When loading the calendar will try to call a JavaScript function, disallowDate(), which allows you to highlight or disable specific dates. see http://www.dynarch.com/static/jscalendar-1.0/doc/html/reference.html#node_sec_3.3 . The date element will also send out ,"click", "focus" and "change" JavaScript events when the date is changed

To round of the summary of the main changes we have made to the elements, it is worth noting that the cascadingdropdown has got itself a 'description' option. This allows you to show an additional piece of related information when the user selects an option from the cascading drop down.

Tables

One of the major areas of work in 2.0.3 was our improvements to the query/code we use for getting the total number of records in a table. This is now done and producing accurate results (previously for tables with lots of joins the total was being incorrectly reported)

Another much asked for feature is the option to deleted joined data when deleting records. This means that if you have a table 'countries' joined to a table 'regions', and you delete a country, any regions belonging to that country will also be deleted

As always we've been working with clients with fairly large data sets and have been able to produce a series of speed improvements in the rendering times of both forms and tables. In the 2.0.3 release these improvements especially in regard to the use of related data.

The CSV export and import has had some tender loving care applied to it, and you should now be able to create new tables via a csv import in connections other than the default connection

One of the areas that often caused users confusion has also been re-coded. Yes, you will be glad to hear that edit and view links are now no longer dependant on whether other elements are set to edit/link to details!
The table now contains separate options to alter view and edit links'

• Visibility
• Custom URL's
• Custom labels
• Option to merge view/edit into one column.

A very neat new table template has been added as well.  "horiz_search" is the same as the default template but the search fields are included under the table headings. This takes up less real estate as is probably easier to read than the default template.

A very new feature is the option to turn on  Ajax for filtering and navigating around the table view. This avoids page refreshes and allows you to visualize your filtered data quicker than before.

Forms

For bronze/silver subscribers, the twitter plug-in has been updated to use oAuth, and now will use bit.ly to shorten any URLs contained within the tweet

The form reset  option has just got that bit cleverer, it will now remove any repeated groups that have been added, and trigger any JavaScript onLoad events that have been applied to the elements, ensuring that your form reverts to its original state.

Again for bronze/silve subscribers, several annoying issues have been resolved in the JUser form plugin. This plug-in allows you to create Joomla users from the data submitted in the form. It can now use data in joined tables for the user/email/password fields, and the emails that it sends out have been fixed  so that if sending mail from admin the site's url no longer contains /administrator/, and the passwords were being shown as the encrypted version rather than their plain text equivalent within the email.

There has been a lot of work gone into some of the core concepts behind Fabrik forms; we have improved the validation display and logic for multi page forms, and increased the stability in the repeat group handling

Groups

Groups can now be split up into columns by specifying the percentage width of each column. This opens up a lot of opportunity for creating more complex form layouts

Visualizations

A bug which stopped filters from being cleared when viewing a visualization has been fixed

Finally we've added a new Google maps clustering option, an example of which can be seen here: http://gmaps-utility-library.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/markerclusterer/1.0/examples/simple_example.html

Download Fabrik 2.0.3

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