Today is a federal holiday in the United States–Thanksgiving–so all of us are spending the rest of the week (and weekend) with our families.  If you also celebrate the holiday, enjoy! 

We’ll be back in the office for what’s supposedly now called "Cyber" Monday…??

[Late November]

Our next release will be a scheduled upgrade to SYNK, to version v1.52.  This new release includes a few core improvements and some new features, including:

• New parameters for synchronizing content that allow you select specific sections/categories/articles to Synk, as well as make exceptions
• New parameters for synchronizing users that allow you to make exceptions by userid
• New plugin for synchronizing content section & category definitions
• New plugin for executing a time-based synchronization of all your content (selected by section/category/specific-article)
• Native support for full deletion of user records on all Synked sites
• Improved error reporting for failed synchronizations

We had also planned to release a Joomla 1.0.x version of Synk at this point, but since J!1.0.x lacks most of the necessary plugin events (onLoginUser, onLogoutUser, onAfterStoreUser) we’ll wait until we release AMBRA before finishing Synk for J!1.0.x

[Early January]

AMBRA has been a long time in the making!    But thanks for your patience — we hope it was worth the wait.

AMBRA is our new User Management component.  It’s actually more of a "suite" of components, but as we describe them, it’s easier to break them down into their distinct parts. 

The core is the AMBRA User Manager.  We’ll have the demo up shortly on our demo servers so you can see it work, but to sum up, it’s a USER-FRIENDLY blend of Community Builder + JUGA.  AMBRA has a Dioscouri take on ACL for Joomla 1.5, and offers 3rd party developers and users with (in our opinion) something a little easier to use than PHPGacl.

Features include:

• Native support for multiple profile types (Buyers vs Sellers, Teachers vs Students, Developers vs Users, etc)
• Many Many Many more plugin events for maximum extensability
• Native support for multiple email & snail-mail addresses per users
• Unlimited "Roles" (User Manager vs JUGA Manager vs Content Manager vs Fireboard Manager)
• Support for multiple "Roles" per User
• Granular ACL that won’t (in most cases) require a change in code for existing components
• Custom fields for user profiles that can vary depending on their profile type

And to think, AMBRA is only our second-most ambitious component… wait until you see PAKET….

[Early January]

AMBRA.Content is a full-fledged replacement for com_content that supports AMBRA’s ACL implementation.  With AMBRA.Content you can manage all of your existing content articles/categories/sections, but you can also:

• Create custom fields for each article
• Allow Registered Users (or anyone of any AMBRA Role) to publish articles
• Limit publication for users to specific categories — creating user-specific blogs
• and more…

[Late January]

AMBRA.Groups is our attempt at picking up where the GroupJive team left off (we were sad to see them go, having used GJ on one of our client sites in the past).  Features include:

• Front-end creation of user-managed groups
• Group-specific message boards (using Scriba as their base)
• Plenty of plugin events for 3pd integration (including "event" and "file-management" components)

[Late January]

In fact, with this blog entry we wanted to introduce a great new capability for JUGA, one that many of you have been requesting:

Why would we build and release this?  Well, take a look at the code you use for checking access.  Yes, it’s that easy and non-invasive.  This means that (for instance) if you wanted to hide certain items within other components (such as JUGA-restricted Fireboard Forums or DocMan categories) and felt comfortable hacking those components, you would only have to insert that very non-invasive code.

Alternatively, though, (and for smaller extensions) you could simply write a replacement.  As a demonstration (and serving also as a JUGA upgrade!) we’re providing you with these new modules (mod_menujuga and mod_quickiconsjuga) and an upgrade to mod_mainmenujuga.

These three modules all employ the new JUGA CheckRights plugin to hide restricted items from view. 

mod_menu and mod_quickicons are replacements for your ADMIN side menu and quickicons modules.  If you use it on your Joomla 1.5 installation

• mod_menujuga will HIDE ADMIN-SIDE Menu Items that are restricted!
• mod_quickiconsjuga will hide those large icons in your Admin Cpanel if they’re restricted!

The new files are available for immediate download by our Charter Members and only for Joomla 1.5.  We’ll have the Joomla 1.0 version of the CheckRights plugin ready shortly.

Enjoy!

All of us here at Dioscouri Design will be doing our part in the morning to bring a better administration into the U.S. government.  We fully expect the voice of the real America to be heard as the polls close and trust that with time, effort, and open-mindedness, we can correct the ills of the Bush administration.

See you in the morning!