A new major stable release of CB GroupJive is now available. Lots of improvements ranging from performance to HTML structure and more. Check out the details below!
First and foremost this is a major release. This means Joomla 3.x support has been discontinued in this release. Joomla 4.x being the new minimum. However recommended minimum is Joomla 5.x.
In addition to the Joomla requirement changes this is a backwards compatibility break in the template system. It no longer uses a Class and Function structure. They're raw layout files like our other integrations and like Joomla itself. Several API calls have also been changed as they were moved to more optimized namespaced classes instead of a super global namespaced class. So if you've a custom implementation calling GJs API please be sure to review your implementation carefully.
The final breaking change is several triggers have had $return removed. Instead the triggers $return is just the return handling for the trigger itself. So your code instead of modifying $return by reference should just do a PHP return when you're ready to output. This impacts ALL onDisplay triggers.
With that out of the way lets talk about what's new. The biggest improvement is a MASSIVE performance overhaul to several of GJs database queries. This touches nearly every list view query. They've all gained substantial performance improvements. On a test site with over 1 million groups and over 1 million users in those groups the All Groups view went from 2 whole seconds down to less than 10 milliseconds. Improvements like this have been made throughout GJ resulting in lightning fast page load times like never before.
Next up is a lot of UX overhaul. Replacing old Bootstrap 3 row usages with flexbox and grid usages. The result is a much cleaner and reliable grid that can be customized using CSS variables. No more strange padding or margin conflicts.
Canvas headers have been redone with larger text and more accessible buttons. Before sizing was conflicting in a lot of regards with group names being too small and buttons being hard to press on mobile. All of which has been improved. This includes the tabs under the canvas header as well. Below is an example of how things now look.
The photos integration has also had an overhaul and while officially replace by the CB Gallery integration we are still supporting the integration for the time being so it was given a makeover to look and feel more like CB Gallery to ease the transition in the future when this integration goes away in favor of migration to CB Gallery.
The same was done for the Videos integration. It now matches CB Gallery and its Panels template. Note there's no hover preview, but does provide a modal window now so people don't have to try watching videos in tiny boxes now.
New stable release of CB Activity, CB Gallery, and CB Auto Actions have also been released. These versions are required if you're using those integrations in order for them to be compatible with GJ 4.0.0. In addition to this a build release of CB Paid Subscriptions is also available if you're using the CBSubs GJ integration please be sure to update.
Beyond that there's mostly just internal improvements in the code itself improving reliability and maintainability. Below is a full list of changes.
https://forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/groupjive/issues?query_id=80
For more details about CB GroupJive please visit its addon page below.