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This month we have some exciting new features ready for you. DPCalendar got certificate support and has new Joomla core scheduler tasks while DPAttachments can do now uploads in article forms.

Continuing our new release strategy, as it is the fourth Thursday in month, we ship some new features in DPCalendar and DPAttachments, while DPMedia and DPCases do get some bugs fixed. The following new feature/patch releases are published today for you:

The following chapters do highlight some of the most important changes. Enjoy!

DPAttachments: Form upload

In recent months we saw an increase in downloads of DPAttachments. So we got some new feature requests and the most popular one was to be able to upload attachments while editing an article, banner or DPCalendar event. In DPAttachments 5.0 you see now the same upload form as in the details page in the editing form in the back and front end.

The only limitation is that it shows up when the article is saved the first time. The reason for this is that it saves the attachments in a path with the article ID in it and this can only be done when the item got the first time saved. How to get started with DPAttachments can be found here.

As this is a new major version, we changed some important parts in the layout files of DPAttachments. Please head on to the upgrade chapter for more information.

Attachments in article form

DPCalendar: Certificates

People are using DPCalendar in ways we have never been dreaming of. One customer needed certificate support for events, which is shipped with version 8.5. Means, when an event has been finished, then is the host able to check in the tickets of the attendees and send out certificates to them. Like that can an event organizer appreciate the attendance.

This plays very nicely with the check in feature, where a guard can check in the attendee by QR code.

The certificate is fully customizable through a layout override. More information about this exciting new feature can be found here.

DPCalendar certificate example

DPCalendar: New scheduler tasks

As the core scheduler extension got adopted more and more in the community, we are able now to implement easily some routine work in DPCalendar as tasks. Beside the existing scheduled email task for events, we added two new ones to make the life of an admin easier.

Send ticket certificates

The send ticket certificates tasks checks for finished events and does send out certificates for tickets which are checked in. More information about certificates can be found in the chapter above.

Delete events

The delete event task, deletes events based on different criteria. You can select a list of calendars or by publishing state. Also when a start or end date has passed a certain age, then they can be deleted as well. Some use cases can be:

  • Delete passed events because of DSGVO
  • Delete cancelled events after a certain period

Delete bookings

The delete booking task, deletes bookings either when they have a certain age or by publishing state. Some use cases can be:

  • Delete old bookings, because they contain personal data which has to be removed according to the local retention policy
  • Delete not finished bookings where the visitor has closed the browser window and didn't correctly abort the process

More information about this exciting new features can be found here.

DPCalendar scheduler tasks

DPCalendar: New PDF engine

The most convenient way to render PDF's in PHP it is with HTML content which is then converted to a binary PDF file. Since the beginning of DPCalendar we have been using the same PDF library to generate invoices and tickets. It is very stable, but has a lot of limitations, so our customers didn't had a lot of styling options. Dompdf is a very active library which can convert a lot of CSS commands into a nice PDF page. So it is more than logical to introduce it in DPCalendar. This change was done with the introduction of certificates, as they got rendered as PDF as well.

All the invoice and ticket overrides do still work from earlier versions, but we highly suggest to adapt them to the new layouts. There is one caveat which must be considered and is explained in the upgrade chapter.

Dompdf in use in DPCalendar

Bugfixes

We are eager to improve our extensions on a regular basis. That's why every major/feature release does contain also bug fixes and small enhancements as well to improve the stability and performance.

DPMedia and DPCases got this time only bug fixes, that's why they are patch release.

Upgrade

While we do our best to make the upgrade experience for as easy as possible, during this release window, we want to inform you about some some issues you might encounter when you update to the new versions.

DPAttachments

To make the form upload work, we had to rebuild the layout files, which are rendering the attachments in the details page and the form view, from scratch. So the easiest way is to start again from the original file. Mainly we had to remove the form element, as form in form tags are not allowed and it is not a valid HTML structure.

DPCalendar

The only thing which doesn't work in an old override of the file /components/com_dpcalendar/layouts/ticket/details.php, is that the QR code is still rendered. There you need to add the following PHP code to your override at the bottom of the file:

<?php if ($qrcode) { ?>
	<div class="dp-qrcode">
		<img src="/<?php echo $qrcode; ?>"/>
	</div>
<?php } ?>

Deprecating DPFields

DPFields was the base for Joomla core custom fields. After the migration it became a simple CCK using the core custom fields and categories as entities. Unfortunately it didn't went out of beta pretty much, and didn't get much attention in last years. We take the stance and deprecate it no and do remove the downloads. Support is still there till end of 2022. It was a great ride, but with all the good CCK's out there, it doesn't really makes sense to have another one.

Kind regards

Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak

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