Preview of Logos 5

Created on Thursday, 29 July 2010 08:30

The next version of Logos revolutionizes the way that people use Joomla and databases, offering a completely new administrative interface on the Joomla 1.6 platform as well as major new features. Let's take a look at the new version of Joomla and the new features that you can expect in the coming months.

Joomla 1.6

First, let us say that we're impressed with the quality of the code and the structure of the architecture.  It's beautiful.  Joomla stands at the fore-front of web standards regarding code quality and extendability, and indeed Joomla shines in this benchmark where many well-established projects tend to slowly lose ground.  A complete feature list can be found here.

But this level of reinvention comes at a price - backwards compatibility.  Despite being a "minor" update, we don't see an upgrade path. Rather, you will need to migrate your site, probably from a development site to a staging site, and then you fire a switch.  We don't expect the migration to be as painful as the migration from 1.0 to 1.5 ( another misunderstanding of what a "minor release" means ), but don't expect to be able to simply unzip the new files under your document root.

One of the challenges for us, as authors of Logos, is that the underlying framework has changed.  For example, in the current framework, parameters are stored as a JSON string, not as an INI string.  This presents a challenge for anyone coming from Joomla 1.5 where all parameters have to be converted to the new format, and there isn't a option to toggle this new feature if you use the new API.

For users not migrating, however, there are a wealth of new features to enjoy, such as the new Category Manager ( which Logos does not use ) and the new Access Control Lists or ACLs.  Adding support for ACLs in Logos will be one of the major new features in our LFRM5 release.

Logos Form and Report Manager 5

With so many changes in the Joomla Framework, the focus of Logos5 will be to simply migrate our existing users to the new platform and improving how administrators use Logos.  We're re-coding the administrative interface from scratch in order to fully utilize the new features found in 1.6, such as the ACLs.

First, we will be adding a new Application Wizard that let's you build forms and reports for multiple databases and that provides extensive configuration options for tables.  All these configurations will be done in a single screen in order to make Logos easier to use for both novice and export users.

Second, we're ditching the Variable Manager.  In the current version of Logos one can manage specific inputs and outputs individually using the Variable Details screen, and while this tool provides a lot of features, most users do not use many of these features.  In Logos5 variables can be managed through the Application Wizard and advanced variable configurations can be done directly in the query, much like many of our advanced users currently do.

Finally, we're splitting Logos into two separate components: Logos Forms and Logos Reports. Logos Forms will focus on form management and is equivalent to the Express edition of LFRM, but will lack the Query or "Action" Manager.  Configurations will be done via the Application Wizard.  Logos Reports is equivalent to what most of our users currently use, LFRM Pro, and can be used to create advanced forms and reports using the Action Manager and custom SQL queries.  Like LFRM Pro, Logos Reports will offer sophisticated features such as Multiple Query Execution and Charting.

When Can I Download ?

We've spent the past month reviewing the new Joomla code and application design, and have already developed many of the new administrative interfaces for the new system.  Joomla itself remains in beta and still a lot of bugs and architectural problems remain unresolved, so we don't expect the new CMS system to be ready for prime-time until year's end, which gives us time to provide Logos5 to our current subscribers for testing and preliminary development.