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This month we added small enhancements to DPMedia, DPCalendar and DPAttachments which will make the life of Joomla admins much more easier. Beside that, DPMedia is also split into individual packages to lower the amount of installed plugins.

Continuing our proven release strategy, as it is the fourth Thursday in month, we ship some new enhancements in DPMedia, DPCalendar and DPAttachments. The following new feature/patch releases are published today for you:

The next chapters do highlight some of the most important changes. As a DPMedia user, please pay special attention on the new package structure chapter!

DPMedia: Resizing improvements

Since the beginning, DPMedia is a performance focused extension. Along the way, we added automatic resize support on upload to all filesystem adapters like Google Drive, Amazon AWS or Microsoft OneDrive. So your publishers are not able to upload big files and kill the performance of your site, which has a negative impact on SEO. In this release there is a new option available which keeps the aspect ratio when a resize is done and both dimensions are set. It is able now to choose the larger size for width and height and resize accordingly, so no cropping is performed anymore.

Another change is that images are not enlarged. Means when they are smaller than the forced width and/or height, then they are left as they are. More information can be found in the docs articles of the filesystem plugins.

Resize parameters

DPMedia: Core media field enhancements

The DPMedia plugin adds the functionality to restrict image or media custom fields to certain media adapters like the restricted one from DPMedia. Now it adds a new option to the core media custom field to revert it back into a simple media field without the accessibility features from Joomla version 4.1. This should only be used for use cases where the media field data is not rendered in a web page as image. For example when you want to define a PDF or DOCX upload field for a user or article.

Please do only use this option when you know what you are doing, as most of the sites do need an alt description for the image field. More information can be found in the content plugin docs article.

Simple media field

DPMedia: New actions

DPMedia contains a references and permissions plugins. They offer the functionality to see the references for a media file or to set permissions for certain user groups. In Joomla 4.2.4 the actions got some accessibility improvements and are rendered now as list with a meaningful text.

The DPMedia restricted and permissions plugins are adapted and do show now also text beside the icon. More information can be found in the docs articles of the context plugins.

actions lists in media manager for folder

DPMedia: Smaller packages

Since joomla 4 there are many more possibilities for an extension to hook into the system or to extend existing extensions with plugins. That's why our installable packages did grow with every new release. For example in DPMedia 1.6.0 has now over 23 extensions for Premium subscribers.

This is nice for the end user but the packages to install are growing too. That's why we make the core packages of our extensions as small as possible and offer the individual plugins as standalone download with their own update servers. The benefit is, that you have to install only the necessary extensions, which do make your system faster when you have less plugins installed. This means for you that in the future you have to install the core package of DPMedia and only the plugins you need.

Please read carefully the upgrade chapter below what you have to do after the update.

Package structure in dpmedia

DPCalendar: Fetch all calendars in one ajax call

DPCalendar has a powerful ajax based calendar view. This view does fetch the calendars in an asynchronous way to speed up the page loading time, especially when the event data is fetched from an external calendar like google or iCloud. For local calendars it makes sense to fetch all of them in one call, like that is only one SQL query executed and the events data loads faster. This feature comes only into action when the calendar list is disabled as it is not possible to disable individual calendars with that setup. More information can be found in the docs articles of the calendar menu item.

actions lists in media manager for folder

DPCalendar: Booking system improvements

The payment providers of DPCalendar do have now a state flag. Like that can an admin disable them and at the same time still keep it in the system. This is needed when some payment providers should be phased out but they are still needed in the system as reference for old bookings.

More information can be found in the docs articles for payment providers.

payment provider config

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.

DPAttachments got this time only bug fixes, that's why this is a patch release. A full changelog is added in the respective download release description on our download site.

Upgrade considerations

Updating to DPAttachments 5.1.1 is straight forward as it is only a bug fix release.

DPMedia

In DPMedia 1.6.0 we changed the package structure to which you should pay attention to, when upgrading. Delete DPMedia plugins you don't need anymore after the update. Due to the new package setup, each extension is delivered a single download bundle. When you are upgrading, DPMedia has installed itself correctly, that you will get a notification for the core package update and each plugin on the next release. That's why you can safely remove not needed DPMedia extensions from your web site.

DPCalendar

In DPCalendar 8.7.0 we made some small changes to the invoice layout files, that the inline PDF options before and after the invoice content can contain HTML code. So if there are overrides for them, update them accordingly.

Kind regards

Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak

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