Joomla! 1.5.4 Released

The Joomla! community have released Joomla! 1.5.4 [Naiki]. This is a normal maintenance release which includes a few low to moderate security issues, many bug fixes, and several very nice improvements. It has been a little over ten weeks since Joomla! 1.5.3 was released on April 24. The Development Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla! community containing the latest bug fixes and minor enhancements.

* Major Cache overhaul, including unit testing for quality assurance
* Router issues related to extending the router
* Menu ordering issues when nested menus were used
* Several Search component fixes, including the removal of HTML tags as possible search results
* Menu permissions issues
* Unpublished menu item issues, including fatal errors and allowing an unpublished menu item to be selected as default
* Banners can handle Flash items
* Polls and Latest and Most Popular articles listed in the Administrator now support GMT dates
* Page titles now follow more consistent rules (see Page Title Parameters for more information)
* Several OpenID improvements

* LDAP security fix to prevent unauthorized access to administration
* Added security to file caching to prevent unauthorized access to cached pages
* User Redirect Spam fix
* htaccess global variable security fix when SEF is enabled (See .htaccess Security Fix)

* OnBeforeContentSave and onAfterContentSave Event Triggers added (See Content Trigger Additions for more information)

o Ability to abort a save by returning false in the onBeforeContentSave trigger

* Added JA_Purity template (See JA_Purity Template for more information)

* Help screens updated (See Help Screens for more information)

* Supports installing site and admin languages in one package (See Language Installation Improvements for more information)

* All line endings changed to n instead of a mix of rn and n

Several nice enhancements are available in Joomla! 1.5.4 including the Language Installation Improvements, new JA_Purity template, recently completed Help Screens, Content Trigger Additions and Page Title Parameter consistencies. More information on each of these topics follow.

A change was made to the htaccess.txt file to move the rewrite rules that block common exploits above the SEF URL rewrite section in order to force SEF URLs through the security checking. This is considered a minor security inprovement.

If you are upgrading your Joomla! 1.5 Web site, you are encouraged to use the Joomla! 1.5.4 delivered htaccess.txt file as your .htaccess file and reapply any changes you might have added for your hosting environment.

Improvements have been added to the Language Installation process so that the Site and Administrator languages can be installed as one package. Look for more information from the Bug Squad and the Translations Working Group blogs for how to use this new capability.

The Joomla! 1.5.4 release has a very special addition. For the first time, the JA_Purity template is now available in core. Last fall, Joomla! announced a Template Contest, requesting submissions from anyone interested. Early in January, five finalists were announced from a field of 30 templates and the community was invited to select their favourite. Over 50% of the votes went to JA Purity. Since that time, the template design has been updated to meet core standards and has undergone rigorous testing. It is now ready and included in the core distribution as one of three templates available for your use.

Joomla! 1.5.4 ushers in another important improvement. The Joomla! 1.5 Help Screens have been completed and are accessible from the Administrator. The Documentation Team has carefully explained how to use each element of the Joomla! user interface. Each function in every Administrator Manager has been meticulously documented to help Web site integrators and administrators understand the numerous options available and the implications of each choice.

One of the most exciting improvements Joomla! 1.5.4 brings is incredible potential. Those who are Joomla! extension developers are encouraged to take a look at two new functions in the Example Content Plugin for a glimpse of new capabilities made available in this release. Consider what is now possible with event triggers that fire before and after content is saved.

The OnBeforeContentSave and OnAfterContentSave event triggers open doors to all kinds of new innovation. Look for new third party extensions that will likely appear quickly offering extensions with email notifications for new articles, ping, automatic posting of articles to social networks, news services, or group blog environments, archive development, and easy to use version management. These triggers are very powerful and will prove to be an important improvement to Joomla!.

Numerous inconsistencies have been identified in how page title parameters are handled in Joomla!. One of the goals of this release is to ensure consistency for page titles across all core menu types, for each core template. This work has been completed and is available in the Joomla! 1.5.4 release.

It is always important to test a release before applying it to a production environment. For this release in particular, pay close attention to page titles during testing as there are likely changes you might want to review and possibly adapt.

There are two places where the page title is displayed. The page title will always appear in the upper left corner of the browser bar and the page title can appear on the actual Joomla! Web page. The same value is always used for the page title whether it prints on the browser bar or the Joomla! Web page.

The page title parameters are set for each menu item in the Parameters (System) section. There are two parameters:

• The Page Title parameter, which is a text field. In this example, the Page Title parameter value contains the legendary "Welcome to the Frontpage" greeting.
• And, the Show Page Title parameter, an option field allowing choices of "Yes" or "No."

 

Displaying or hiding the page title on the Joomla! Web page

Show Page Title Parameter. The Show Page Title parameter determines whether or not a page title is displayed on the Joomla! Web page. This example demonstrates Show Page Title set to "No." In this case, the "Welcome to the Frontpage" page title is not printed on the Joomla! Web page. Compare this with the first image in this article where Show Page Title is set to "Yes" and the "Welcome to the Frontpage" page title is displayed on the Joomla! Web page.

The page title always appears in the browser bar. When Show Page Title is set to "Yes", Joomla! uses the same page title value for both the browser bar and the Joomla! Web page.

Each Joomla! menu type now implements these principles consistently.