The Calm Before the Release


Date

Many of you asked if we were still up and running supporting the Ohanah project. Short answer: Yes we do! Its a very legitimate question as in the past period we have been very quiet on social networks and especially here, on our blog. The reason is that we have been very busy, so busy and focused on working on this release and beyond, that we forgot to tell you about it.

Let us introduce you to one of the biggest release in the history of Ohanah v2. Say hello to Ohanah version 2.3.23! It’s a huge release with a lot of improvements and small fixes.

1) We improved how we handle the closing registration date for repeating events. Now offset is properly calculated so each repeating event have precise closing date relative to it’s start date. We hope that with this now you can enjoy our recurring events feature even more!

2) As we were improving closing dates for repeating events we also noticed that if you change master event alias, other events in the set don’t play nice and use old aliases. We fixed that so now you can edit, change, reschedule and do pretty much anything with repeating events - aliases will always follow the leader.

3) We fixed the bug that caused the filters in the Ohanah search module to behave inconsistently in certain scenarios. The result of this fix is that now, your visitors will benefit of a better user experience and always see active filters in the dropdown.

4) For the ones who runs Ohanah under the secure http protocol (https) we solved some issues that were avoiding Ohanah to fully and correctly work under those conditions.

5) The category image module now works perfectly with the single event view. This means that you can render the images related to the category of the event on the same page where single event is displayed. This allows you to have the same images for all the events in the same category, without the need to upload the same images for each event.

6) Image editing from front-end is now back! We have completely rewritten this part of the code to avoid any possible problems and conflict with other extensions on your site. On top of that, we also improved front-end submission by applying default custom fields to events that came from your users.

7) We tested all the schema.org microdata that Ohanah has built in. We did this to make sure that with the recent support of microdata in Joomla v3, you are now a step closer to a fully semantic website, completely optimized for search engines. During this process we also improved the Open Graph meta tag Ohanah has built in. It’s the one that is used when somebody share event on the Facebook.

The following is the whole list of all other things we fixed and improved in this release:

##Other Features

  • Improved CLEditor (default Ohanah editor) is updated to newest version.
  • Improved Facebook comments widget is now responsive, it will adapt to your page width.
  • Improved Performance boost is done to the JSON output. Now both calendars and mobileapp should be a little bit quicker (your mileage may vary depending on how much events you have).
  • Improved When used on non-Ohanah page, Filter module showed All events by default. We listened to your feedback and now default behaviour is that Upcoming events are showed by default.
  • Improved We added French Pacific Francs (XPF) as a currency.
  • Improved Install script cleanup.

##Other Bug fixes

  • Fixed Events are sorted only by date. When the date is same, creation date was used automatically by the system. Fixed by sorting events by date and time.
  • Fixed In IE11 description is not saved on some sites.
  • Fixed In IE some checkboxes in backend are on wrong places.
  • Fixed When cache is enabled, settings are “not saved”. We finally managed to work around this annoying issue so it shouldn’t happen again.
  • Fixed On servers running PHP 5.5.x, some warnings are exposed if error reporting is turned on.
  • Fixed Using City + Country as a format of rendering venue name produce City, City.
  • Fixed Apostrophe in address field breaks venue editing.
  • Fixed On nginx server, attachments are not properly saved because of different handling of index.php in the URL by the server.
  • Fixed Alias is not properly formed when Polish characters are used in name of an event.
  • Fixed “soldout” - CSS class that it’s added to events container when event is full - is applied completely opposite as it should be.
  • Fixed If there are dropdowns in non-ohanah modules in Ohanah’s pages, those dropdowns can be rendered badly due Ohanah’s CSS code. Fixed by adding prefix to selectors.
  • Fixed If “Show Page Heading” in menu item is set to yes, and “Page Heading” fields is left empty, instead of hiding title, Ohanah display default title.
  • Fixed Due to the recent changes in mobile operating systems “Saving to cal” feature is not working when page is viewed from mobile devices. This is because ics MIME type is handled differently across different versions of mobile operating systems and browsers. For now, we hide “Save to call” button when page is viewed from mobile device until there is a fix for this behaviour and all your users can have consistent and intended experience.
  • Fixed Category and Venue image modules are rendered empty if there are no images. Fixed by adding “No images available” messages in that case.
  • Fixed When Event list module is used to display featured events and there are no featured events - all events are shown, misleading users that all of them are featured. This is fixed, so if there are no featured events - message will appear.
  • Fixed Some modules contained hard coded breaks (
    ) so they couldn’t be used for horizontal layout. Fixed by removing hard breaks and using CSS to separate lines.
  • Fixed TBA (To Be Added), that is displayed when there is no available information (like when you publish event without address), is hardcoded string. Fixed by moving it to language file so you can override or hide it completely with Joomla’s native language override feature.
  • Fixed In registration view, breadcrumbs were set back to default Ohanah page. Fixed so now breadcrumb on registration page is like: Home / Ohanah / Single Event / Register
  • Fixed On some hosts, with bad settings, system tmp folder is used instead of Joomla’s one. This is still an issue with sites on byte.nl, the Dutch hosting company. We are working on this, but strange settings on their servers are causing some parts of Ohanah not to work as expected. We have a guide for workaround for those who use their hosting, until we fix the issue.

##What to expect next?

We aim to do another v2 release between August and September. That release will mark the end of the v2 development and the start of the v3 development. This means that with the next release v2.x will go into maintenance and bug-fixing only mode. We won’t add new features to it, but don’t worry, we’ll keep fully supporting our customers and do bug-fix releases where needed. It also means that from around October we’ll put all our focus in developing the next version of Ohanah. For this reason in the past months we analyzed all of the tickets regarding Ohanah v2, all the ideas and suggestion that our customers popped in our dedicated forum and we have just opened the v3 beta program where we will focus on 4 main areas to start with:

  1. Multiple Pricing / Tickets per event
  2. Categories (Multiple & Nested Categories)
  3. Registrations Workflows
  4. Email/Notification Workflows

If you have an active Ohanah membership plan, signup for the v3 beta program today.