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A productive year to all of you!

2014 has come to an end. It has a been another great year of progress for our little project and we expect 2015 to be no different. We are starting the year off with two great releases and are looking forward to what the rest of 2015 has in store. Here is a little overview.

Todo component

Todo is a getting started component that shows how to build a Joomla (H)MVC powered extension using Joomlatools Framework. The component comes with a nice step by step tutorial, and includes support for our activities component and composer installer. It's a great way to get started with our framework.

Credits go to Mati and Ercan for the development of the component. Arunas for the integration with the Activities component. Kudos go to Cameron for excellent work on the documentation and Steven for making it installable using Composer.

Composer installer

At the end of 2014 we also released our Composer installer. The installer is capable of installing Joomlatools Framework into Joomla, has support for installing our re-usable components into the /vendor folder and can install Joomlatools Framework powered Joomla extensions in Joomla 2.5 and 3.x.

The installer is the beating heart of our framework's component driven architecture. It is capable if installing components and injecting them into the bootstrapper, no additional configuration required.

Credits go to Steven and Oli for pushing this, and making it simple, configuration-less and easy to use.

What's coming in 2015

We are already working very hard on more developer related information. Cameron is putting in lots of hours to add more framework documentation. We hope to be able release our Web API and Events API documentation later this year. The UI concepts are still being worked on for this one; It's looking very good!

Development on Joomlatools Framework 2.1 has also started. Support for PHP 5.2 is being dropped. We are working on API improvements to the dispatchers to improve the HMVC implementation. Our goal is to make re-using a component a “simple single line of code” operation. As promised, all changes will be 100% compatible.

Finally, we are working on more re-usable components. Work has started on a tagging component, and we are also working on a component to support Varnish based ESI caching.

Lots of great stuff in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Happy coding!