We have been a tad quiet lately but, nevertheless, working tirelessly to bring you some exciting news. After finishing up some pending new features, and providing fixes to some reported issues, the moment we all have been waiting is finally here. We are delighted to announce the availability of DOCman for WordPress v2.0.
What is so exciting about this new release? Well ... put simply: we have built the most complete and easy-to-use notifications system there is. We understand how important it is to keep everyone informed about changes within your documents library, so we have put great care into building a system that is simple-to-use, yet, very powerful.
In this blog post I'm going to introduce the main features included in this release, some important functional changes you should be aware of and then I'll let you in on some of the future development plans we have for DOCman.
Notifications
This is the flagship feature of this major release bringing true notifications support to your WordPress document manager ... let me show how easy and straightforward it is to add, edit and delete notifications in DOCman.
DOCman notifications are sent based upon user activity on your site. When a user executes a given action on an entity (a document or a document category), with a notification set for this specific action, then a notification gets sent to one or more recipients about this user activity.
Notifications can be set on categories and they will apply to the category itself, the documents it contains, and optionally, that category's subcategories and their corresponding documents (inheritance).
Notifications types
Being able to send E-mail notifications is nice, but the notifications system is capable of so much more.
When adding a notification the very first step is always to select a notification type. The whole system has been built with extensibility in mind, allowing you to easily implement any type of notification you can think of: SMS, API triggers, smoke signals ... you name it!
For the time being, E-mail is the only notification type available out-of-the-box, but not for long, as we are planning to add more notifier types in future releases.
You'll find more details on how the notification system works in the documentation section.
Template overrides
The concept of overrides is very well known in the Joomla! world. If this does not ring a bell the principle is very simple: being able to modify the application's output without having to make changes in any core files, and thus, preserving these changes during plugin updates. This is a very useful mechanism for supporting a whole lot of new possibilities: custom fields, markup changes, etc.
While Joomla! provides the tools to accomplish this with ease, in WordPress there's no such out-of-the-box mechanism for providing this functionality, so we went ahead and developed the tools for making this possible.
If you would like to know more about template overrides and how to write your own, please check the template overrides documentation.
Translation overrides
As with template overrides, WordPress does not provide an out-of-the-box solution for plugins locale. Plugin developers are therefore presented with two main choices:
- Rely on another plugin for handling site translations.
- Take matters into your own hands.
As a dedicated development team, we live and die by the following simple rule: the less dependency, the better ... so, of course, at Joomlatools we chose the latter of these two options and opt to provide locale support ourselves.
With DOCman 2.0 you can now provide your own translations for properly tailoring the text output to suit your own locale. We've written a comprehensive guide to help you through the whole process of writing your own custom translations.
JSON API
This new add-on is aimed at developers that want to integrate their apps with DOCman. DOCman for WordPress v2.0 improves the JSON capabilities significantly and fully implements the JSON API specification
This specification intends to provide a framework to consume JSON responses in a standardised way, without the need to re-invent the wheel. It aims to increase both productivity and efficiency through conventions issued from best practices.
Currently all of our frontend blocks can be consumed through the JSON API by simply adding format=json to the URL query. Neat right?
Fixes and minor changes
Owner fields in the document form
Previously, the ownership of a document could only be changed while editing existing documents. Users adding new documents can now assign the owners if they belong to a DOCman managing group. This is valid for both the frontend document form and the batch upload view.
You may define users as managers by simply adding groups in the Manage action available in the global permissions tabs of the DOCman settings view. In the screenshot below we have set users belonging to the Editor group as managers with the Manage action.
Ordering
Users notified us about two small issues related to ordering categories in the frontend. The first prevented blocks from displaying categories by custom ordering, the second meant that category trees couldn't be displayed by reverse order. Both of these issues have now been fixed and you can display categories in any order you want, category trees can be sorted by reverse title (alphabetically) and reverse date (oldest first).
Other minor fixes worth mentioning:
- Block document search results not including documents from descending categories.
- Added some missing translations.
- Editor content being lost on save when switching between Visual/Text modes.
Future development
With both the notifications and full JSON API implementations out of the way, not forgetting the override mechanisms that got added!, we are now concentrating our efforts on the following three topics:
Tags filtering
The way we envision tagging support in DOCman for WordPress is a bit different. We didn't want to settle with basic tagging filtering, i.e. being able to select one or more tags and then filter a list of entities tagged with at least one of those tags. This is basically what most tagging implementations do. Instead, we would like DOCman to be able to set more advanced and useful filters based on those tags.
Our tagging system will provide the tools for defining a tag filtering operation of your choice and then DOCman will do the heavy lifting for you. For example ... imagine that you would like to display a list of PAID audio and video documents ... the tags filtering operation could be written as: audio AND video AND NOT free ... this is the kind of tagging implementation that will allow you to define truly useful filters for refining the resulting set of documents.
Filtering blocks
Additionally to the advanced tagging filtering presented above, we'd like to introduce a new type of block for filtering data. Filtering blocks are a new type of views aiming to provide a set of filters, within lists, which are fully configurable and driven by tags and groups of tags. They'll allow for easy and straightforward filtering of entities (documents and/or document categories) based on customisable selectors in the frontend.
Categories and documents auto-creation
Wouldn't it be neat if you could upload your folders and files, by FTP, rsync, etc. and have DOCman do the necessary but time-consuming work of generating your categories and documents, then importing those files into DOCman's filesystem, for you?
This how DOCman works on the Joomla! platform, we've had more than a few requests to bring this functionality to WordPress too, so, rest assured! We're working on it.
Work on all these topics is already well underway, we'll let you know as soon as they're available to use. In the meantime, we'll continue to provide regular maintenance releases, taking the opportunity to push some minor improvements here and there.
As always, we would like to take the time and thank you for your support and for helping us to grow DOCman for WordPress! We have received a ton of awesome and invaluable feedback during the last few months ... you guys rock!
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