Logos 5 Official Release

Created on Sunday, 27 February 2011 07:02

We're ecstatic to announce the official release of Logos 5.  There are so many new and improved features that it's really difficult to summarize them, but we'll start with the most important.

Joomla 1.6 Native

That's right - Logos 5 is a native extension for the new Joomla 1.6 Content Management System. We've revised almost every part of Logos to use the best features of the new system, and now you can enjoy the full benefits of Joomla 1.6 and Logos together. We spend the better part of 2010 making the revisions, and that means you have access to all the new features right now.

Access Control Lists

Some of the most exciting features are the new access controls that Joomla introduced in the latest release, and that are now implemented in Logos.  This means you can precisely control who has access to the forms and reports that you have created using Logos.  For example, you can define a group that can view and add records, and another group that can only manage and edit.  You can also easily toggle the viewability of fields by group.

Wizard Orientation

More than any previous release, Logos 5 is designed for experts and new users alike.  We've completely revised the wizards so that anyone can generate an application in under five minutes, and if you decide to make changes later, no problem - Logos will pickup the changes and you can rebuild the application. More advanced users creating custom forms and reports can easily indicate which applications and actions should or should not be managed by Logos.

Administrative Access

In Logos 5 you can easily run your forms and reports via both the normal site interface and the administrative interface.  In fact, you can mark applications as administrative only, and use our new Logos Menu Module to easily access them from the admin console.

New Documentation

We're completely rewritten our documentation in a variety of tutorials organized for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users.  Each tutorial is focused on common tasks that you will do in Logos.  Advanced users can still enjoy in-depth analysis of advanced features useful for creating custom forms and reports.

General Improvements

In our fifth major release of Logos, we've emphasized improvements to the user interface and how you will use Logos, but we've also made several important improvements regarding how Logos works.

Date Handling

In this release we've improved how dates are used in the forms and reports, adding some default conversions so that you don't have to worry about it yourself.  Logos 5 now auto-detects and smoothly handles the standard ways dates are stored in the database.

Notifications and Messages

Its now easier than ever to show customized messages and notifications using the new features of Logos 5 that let you include user input and database output in these messages. Now it is quite easy to create a customized template to show a record using the built-in HTML editor - there is no need to create a custom layout file.

Logging

One feature of any great application is it's ability to log messages.  Now you can easily browse and search the logs using the Logos Log Manager, giving you instant access to useful information about how users are interacting with Logos.

Export Controls

We've also added additional parameters that toggle the accessibility of data in non-HTML formats, such as XML and CSV.  In Logos 5 you easily enable the export toolbar and the particular formats that users can download.

Same Great Features

Logos remains one of the best solutions to easily creating automatically generated or customized forms and reports.  We've updated our demo website with lots of examples that show how you can use Logos to integrate your data onto the web.

Download and Updates

If you are an existing customer who has purchased a support subscription with the past year, don't worry, you can download Logos 5 for free from our Downloads page.  Those whose subscription has expired can extend their subscription and receive a 25% discount by accessing their Order History and clicking the Extend link.