EasyTable Pro 1.1.4

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Category: 1.1

Published on Monday, 11 June 2012 18:10

Written by Craig Phillips

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EasyTable Pro! 1.1.0 is out and brings the last of the 1.0.0 features to the Joomla! 2.5 compatible release.

The current release is at 1.1.4 and it is 100% feature complete with EasyTable Pro 1.0.0 for Joomla! 1.5.

New Features

Access Control (Real ACL ala Joomla! 2.5)

As part of the upgrade process for Joomla! 2.5 we had to look at how to integrate the basic access control we had provided for EasyTable Pro! 1.0. Sadly Joomla! 1.5 lacks a real system for access control so a lot of unsightly code was required to provide the basic feature. With Joomla! 2.5 of course that has all changed - so rather than just "making it work" with tweaks to the old code we've completely ripped it out and implemented the new Joomla! 2.5 ACL. We didn't stop there though we added a lovely set of "Actions" that you can now control for each and everyone of your "User Groups".

Apart from the standard Joomla! 2.5 Core actions for Administering EasyTable Pro, create/delete/edit/edit own/edit state — we've added actions to control whether users can "Link to other tables" or "Allow Raw Data Entry".

New Table Wizard

To simplify the creation of new tables we've created a wizard which steps you through the first import of data into your table and provides even more tooltips to help you understand what is happening.

Once you've successfully imported your data file you can simply click on a button at the end of the Wizard and start customising your new table.

Ranked View

If EasyTable Pro! 1.1.0, detects that the table has a specific sort order it automatically calculates a ranking for each record in the table. You can see a simple example on the demo website.

Changes

EasyTable Pro! 1.1 is Joomla! 2.5+ Only, if you need Joomla! 1.5 support you can use the EasyTable Pro! 1.0 line.

EasyTable Pro 1.1 does not support the interim versions 1.6.x or 1.7.x - apart from the serious security issues that these version have there were changes made in the CMS layer of Joomla! 2.5 that mean we would be supporting multiple versions for a diminishing return. So it's 2.5 all the way.

Table List View

The Table List view now supports very long lists of tables by implementing Joomla's standard pagination controls for long list. Of course you can also turn pagination off if it's not required.

Better SEF URLs

The EasyTable Pro router has been improved to remove the table ID where possible and if a suitable menu item exists remove the component name.  Please note: links to an EasyTable from searches may still result in table ID's appearing in the URL. In a future version we're hoping to reduce this even further by scanning the Joomla! Menu structure looking for a menu item that points to the same table as the search result.

 Upgrading From EasyTable Pro 1.0

Minimum Requirements

The minimum requirements for EasyTable Pro! 1.1 have increased slightly, inline with Joomla! 2.5. The requirements are:

Installation

The typical scenario we've envisaged is that "upgraders" will have used one of the Joomla! 1.5->2.5 migration tools to bring their content across to a new Joomla! 2.5 installation. Most tools will copy all of your database tables into your new Joomla! 2.5 website, if they haven't you can copy them across using your MySQL tool of choice.

When EasyTable Pro 1.1 detects previous EasyTable tables in your database it will change from a standard install to an update and try to bring the core tables into line with the new versions.  You can read more about it in the "Installing EasyTable Pro! 1.1" article.