Admittedly, we haven't been very active with news and updates for the last twelve months. We have instead been super focused on the gargantuan task of bringing everything Joomlatools up to par with Joomla 4 and PHP8. Not an easy feat considering the amount of code that had to be rewritten, tested and re-tested.
Ready for Joomla 4
Over the last year, we've released Joomla 4 compatible versions of all of our extensions. It's been a monumental effort to make sure that, no matter the setup you choose, everything will just work. Be that Joomla 3 on php7 running MySQL5, or, Joomla 4 running on a bleeding-edge server that uses php8 and MySQL8, or any other combination, our extensions are up to it!
If we take just DOCman 4.0 for instance, since the dawn of 2021 we've invested over 5,000 man hours, closed over 75 tickets, making it by far the biggest release we've ever done in terms of features and functionality.
We didn't stop there, our Joomla 4 extensions do not require any migrations, or special upgrade procedures, just a simple one click update and you are on your way.
DOCman for WordPress
That's not all ... we also released DOCman for WordPress to our Agency and Business subscribers. Yes that's right, DOCman for WordPress is ready!
We've come a long way since we first announced DOCman for WordPress over 2 years ago. We had quite a bit of interest after our first announcement, but we also quickly learned there was much we still had to learn about WordPress.
Instead of pushing out a 1.0 public release we have spent the past 2 years working with our early adopters, who have been a great help, to fine-tune and improve DOCman for WordPress to perfection. We released versions 1.1 and 1.2 internally, then, with the latest 1.3 release we think it's now ready for prime time!
We didn't just convert DOCman to be able to run on WordPress, it's been completely rewritten from the ground up. From Gutenberg editor blocks all the way through to a completely rewritten and fabulously intuitive permissions system, it's all there. Unlike Joomla, WordPress doesn't have a baked-in permissions layer, this freed us up to make DOCman's permissions in WordPress even more user-friendly and you'll be able to easily set up any workflow you need. Lot's more coming very soon!
Joomlatools for Joomlatools.com
You may have noticed that things changed a little bit on our website, the changes are subtle but we hope you'll like them and that they make our site a little bit easier to use.
You won't so much see the biggest change, but you will feel it for sure. Under-the-hood we have completely rewritten our site to make use of two of our new developer tools: Joomlatools Pages and Joomlatools Server, making joomlatools.com lightning fast no matter the device you're using. So fast in fact that most people assume they're running a web-app.
Joomlatools Pages
A little over fourteen months ago we introduced you to Joomlatools Pages, our easy to use page generator for Joomla inspired by the ideas and concepts of flat-file CMS systems and static site generators.
Pages ushers in a totally new way to develop websites with Joomla, it's not only very flexible and powerful but also very easy to use. You don't need to be a PHP whizz, if you know a bit of markdown, and some HTML, Pages will handle the rest.
Thousands of development hours have already gone into Joomlatools Pages, with version 0.23.1 released just last week. We'll tell you more about about it in an upcoming blog post but in the meantime you can check out the release announcements and make sure to star the Github repo if you want to be kept informed.
Joomlatools Server
Joomlatools Server is our home-grown, cloud-native stack. It's specially tailored for developing websites with Joomla CMS (offering support for both Joomla 3 and 4), WordPress and Joomlatools Pages. It's a Docker container you can run locally using Docker Desktop, remotely using Gitpod or deploy on any Docker capable hosting environment.
You're using Joomlatools Server right now, joomlatools.com is, as you would expect, developed and deployed using it. To learn more about Joomlatools Server be sure to sign up to our newsletter and we'll keep you informed about the ways in which it can help you to develop Joomla sites locally, or self host your own sites as well.
It's been a very intense 18 months for the whole team, we are all very excited and proud of the work accomplished. You can expect to hear more from us very soon!