After successfully updated of our extensions to PHP 8.1 and Joomla 4.4 two months ago, it is time to do that with DPCalendar as well.
Following our established release strategy, we are excited to announce a new major and minor version of DPCalendar and a new patch version of DPAttachments, as it is the fourth Thursday of the month. Today, we are releasing the following updates:
The next chapters are highlighting some of the most important changes in this release window. The requirements lifting is now finished with the release of 9.0.0 for DPCalendar.
DPCalendar 9.0.0
As announced in the latest article about the minimum lifting of our extensions to PHP 8.1 and Joomla 4.4, we deliver now DPCalendar in it's own release window with a minimum of these versions. DPCalendar had still the architecture of Joomla 3 extensions to ensure perfect compatibility with Joomla 3. That means that every feature we shipped, worked down to joomla 3.10.5. This put a lot of legacy burden on us and allocated a lot of resources to ensure compatibility between three major versions from 3 to 4 to 5. As 6 is already in planing we made the decision to lift DPCalendar up to the new architecture, introduced in Joomla 4 by Allon Moritz, our lead developer.
This move allowed us to cleanup the code base from a lot of legacy hacks and to use namespaces to its full extend. We could also use more modern coding practices and are now able to integrate PHP 8.1 and Joomla 4/5 only features.
Joomla 3 compatibility
Joomla 3 is end of life since 17. of August 2023 and is now running in extended security support. We know that still a lot of Joomla 3 web sites exist which are under actively use. So we supported them till now in DPCalendar as they were active development versions of the community. That means every new feature in DPCalendar worked also in Joomla 3.
From now on we put DPCalendar 8.x in hybrid maintenance mode as we still care about our Joomla 3 users. Today is also DPCalendar 8.19 released with the same features as 9.0.0. In the future if a new feature or bug fix request is done from a Joomla 3 site support case, then we will implement it in version 8.x and also 9. If the support request comes from Joomla 4.4 or above, then on 9.x only. Like that we do ensure that all customers of us are treated equally till the Joomla 3 extended security phase ends in February 2025.
Upgrade considerations
As it is a new major version of DPCalendar, it is highly recommended to test the upgrade first on a clone of your site. Or at least make a backup before it. We put a lot of effort to make old template overrides compatible with version 9.0.0, that's why we leave them in place during the upgrade process and do not disable them like we did in last years. But there might be some edge cases where we missed something, so don't hesitate to file a support case if there are issues.
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.
A full changelog is added in the respective download release description on our download site.
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak