CB Activity 7.0.0 is here with some awesome new features! More post features, access controls, performance improvements, and so much more. Check out the details below.
The biggest improvement is individual activity, comment, and notification Access. This allows individual activity, comments, and notifications to have a View Access Level assigned to them. The primary purpose of this is to synchronize access across streams. So for example activity that belongs to an Article will have the same Access as the article. By doing this we can aggregate away posts a user can't access through the database instead of server side using PHP. This has substantially improved performance and significantly reduced the number of incomplete pages due to aggregation. For now this is managed primarily internally or through backend management views, but this parameter maybe exposed to frontend views in the future. Note existing activity, comments, and notifications were left untouched and are defaulted to Public for backwards compatibility purposes.
Activity stream filters have been enhanced substantially. First up is the new Search by Date filter. This lets your users search a stream using a date range. This supports up to a date, after a date, or between two dates.
You'll also notice the filter dropdown has been redesigned. It no longer has individual search buttons, but a single central button. This goes into the next awesome feature. Multiple filters! With multiple filter support you can stack multiple search criteria into a single search to better drill down posts. This extends to the pre-defined filters as well. Lets take a look at what a multi-filter would display as.
Multiple filters will compress into a badge like display so you know multiple are being applied. In this example the Mentions pre-filter has been selected. Following that I've searched for a specific hashtag, mentioning a specific person, and with the Question flair. Then I'm searching for the word "hello" in the post between a date range. You'll also notice the new red X icon. That is how you will clear filters going forward. You no longer have to open the dropdown and click "All" (which is now gone).
Search by Hashtag also has a neat new feature as well. Hashtag Links. When enabled a stream can intercept a hashtag link and instead of navigating away it can apply the hashtag filter directly to the stream the user is on. This is perfect if you want to minimize load times and keep users engaged to their current stream.
We're not done with searching though. CB Activity now includes a Joomla Smart Search plugin. This will allow indexing of posts and comments. This primarily only indexes messages. So media only posts aren't indexed since there isn't really anything for Joomla to search in that regard.
Up next is a long awaited feature. Polls! Posts can now include, or even require, a poll. Polls allow users to define a list of options to select from and vote on. This can be configured per-stream to be enabled/disable, access restricted, and the number of poll options allowed.
Any registered user is permitted to vote in a poll. They are not access restricted beyond the post itself being accessible.
Poll results will automatically calculate their vote percentage and display the total number of votes. Coloring of leading options is also automated.
Once a poll has votes it can no longer be edited, but it can be deleted.
Next up is an improvement for Flair. Flair now supports Categories. Categories allow for better organization of flair making it easier for user selection.
This leads into the new feature. Exclusive flair. A flair category can be marked Exclusive. This will restrict the flair selection within the category to only 1 of its available flair. In the above example I can only select Spoiler OR Adult from the Exclusive category (Note that is just the example name for the category. You can name them freely!). I can then also optionally select Question and Love since they're not in the Exclusive category.
Another great new feature for Flair is Article Tag Mapping. Within the CB Activity Bot plugin you can now map Joomla article tags to flair. When an article creates an activity entry, if you have that activity enabled, it will map the Joomla article tags to flair and apply the flair automatically to the post.
We're still not done. Since we now have tag mapping it's likely you don't want some tags user-selectable since you're just mapping them from articles. It's now possible to create Hidden flair. Such flair can only be applied programmatically and can not be selected by users manually.
Next up is edit limits on posts and comments. Sometimes it's best to prevent communities from editing things a year after it has been posted for example to avoid data loss or odd out of place posts. This is now possible with the Edit Timeline feature. You can supply a custom strtotime relative date to completely customize your own edit timeline for posts.
So for example lets say I have +1 DAY. This would mean I can only edit the post for 1 day then it becomes locked for editing. At that point I however can still delete it.
Post Moderation has also improved. You'll notice within the Display tab of your streams a new Moderator Access parameter. This lets you select who has moderator permissions over the stream. This is now a great way to grant moderator permissions to other users without having to make them CB Moderators.
The CB Activity Module has been enhanced with some new modes. First up is 2 new Hashtag displays.
You can now display a hashtag cloud or a hashtag popular list. Both will link to your hashtag stream and automatically apply their filter.
Next up is the new Posts mode. This mode lets you display activity posts outside the context of their streams. Meaning it can effectively display whatever posts you want without having to make a new stream to do so and it can do so in any Joomla module position you like.
There has been a lot of substantial improvements to post behavior under the hood as well. Copy-paste of inline mentions, hashtags, and links is now fully functional. Meaning you can copy-paste something like "hello @frank" and it will automatically handle the mention under the hood.
Mention and Hashtag dropdowns have had their responsiveness significantly improved. Their API endpoint was streamlined to load less data, respond faster, and reduce the debounce delay allowing for both to reach the server much quicker.
Comments now support sharing just like activity. If sharing is enabled you should see the new Share link below a comment. This works the same as activity. Letting users share direct URLs to comments, embedding them, or quickly sharing to external media sources.
SEO post metadata is now automated for activity and comments. When sharing a activity post or comment you'll notice title, description, opengraph, and twitter card metadata is now automatically handled. This can optionally be turned off globally as well if you want to implement your own via CB Auto Actions.
New CB Gallery and CB Auto Actions build releases are also now available for CB Activity 7.0.0 compatibility so be sure to update those as well!
For a full change log please visit our forge below.
https://forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb-activity/issues?query_id=288
For more details about CB Activity please visit its addon page below.
https://www.joomlapolis.com/addons/cb-activity
More great features are planned for future releases, but I hope everyone enjoys all the great new additions!