If you install recent release of our Xpert Scroller and Xpert Caption module you might have seen a new installer saying module installed along with our brand new Extension framework. We've spent last couple of week discussing how to improve our extensions functionality and seamless maintenance.
We've revised our codebase and found that we are not following DRY(Dont Repeat Yourself) principals which is very fundamental principle for software development. So we decided to follow the principle strictly and extension framework idea derive form it.
Why a new framework?
Joomla is providing a rich API to develop extension for it, so why new framework? well let me give you an example, our every module which deals with Joomla article need to do some common task like: pulling Joomla article from database, filtering introtext, resizing image etc. So when Joomla change its API like it did from 1.5 to 1.6,1.7,2.5 and 3.0 its become a nightmare to update all our extension to latest Joomla version. So we decided to separate the common code from original module codebase and made an toolset library which will boost up our development.
Is that important for me?
The benefiting part from user end is that, you will get faster update of our extensions also for 3rd party support like we give for K2, EasyBlog, Flicrkr. But it is more important from our end because, now we have unified codebase which allow us to update and fix as quickly as possible. Making new module is just matter of few codes, yes you heard right!
Is that Joomla 3.0 Ready?
The framework is fully compatible and tested with Joomla 3.0 so all extension based on the framework will compatible with Joomla 3 as well. To give you a better experience we bring some UI elements from Joomla 3 into Joomla 2.5. You can see it in picture below:
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Unified Installer
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Clik here to view.
From now all our extension will come with a unified installer which will install the framework and extension itself. If the framework already installed it will check for update in the current module package and update the framework if necessary.
What about other extensions?
Right now we are working on our others modules to update with this framework. Once we've made the transition we'll release it. To get update notification follow us on Twitter , Facebook or keep your eyes open on our update page
Is it free?
Unlike Expose we've no plan to release it now, this framework is solely developed for our uses and need a lot of improvement. Once it graduate from our lab we'll think about to release it under GNU/GPL license.
