Trombinoscope Contacts v3.0 free and pro will bring a truck load of improvements and new features that I could not wait to share with you. The beta testing will open soon!
Joomla 3.8+ compatibility
It was time to move on and take advantage of Joomla's improvements and pave the way to the upcoming Joomla 4.
Elimination of deprecated code
Backward compatibility code has been removed to make Trombinoscope Contacts faster. That means: if you have created overrides for views, layouts or module instances, they will likely break. Removing bloated code could not be done without this sacrifice.
More theme overrides
Override the selected theme with more available options so you don't need to use additional CSS as much. The themes have gone through a major cleanup and you will need to download and install them again for version 3.0 (if you use themes that are not packaged by default)
Unlimited selection of contact information
There is no more limitation in the amount of contact information you can show in any module instance or view of the extension.
Layouts for contact information
Each piece of information is now using layouts so you can override the output precisely (under details).
New menu item: Contacts edition
This new view is a major addition to the extension. If a user is connected in any way to a contact (either by being linked to the contact or by being the creator of the contact), he/she will be able to edit, delete or create more contacts from the front-end side of the site.
Fields for edition can be hand-picked in the global configuration of Trombinoscope Contacts Pro, so you can decide how to group them and in which order (look for the edit tab).
On the front-end, a user will see all contacts he/she is connected to.
Selecting a contact will open the contact in edition mode. There are 3 main tabs: Details, Miscellaneous and Publishing. Grouped custom fields will show under their own tab.
Fine-tuning of access permissions
With the addition of contact edition, it became necessary to address access permissions in a more granular way. Decide which and how users can access contact edition and what actions they can make.
Import contacts per category
Now you can determine in which category all contacts will be placed under, no need to add the information into the CSV file anymore. You can also link all contact to the same user.
Here it is! This is, in a nutshell, all the major features you will find in Trombinoscope Contacts 3.0 in the upcoming weeks. Watch out for the beta so you can try it out yourself. Updating to this version will be pretty straight forward if you have not created any template overrides. You will find update instructions to help you with that. In any case, be safe and try the update before going live.
