Cobalt 9 - Joomla 3 Series CCK roadmap

Cobalt 8 is about to get stable flag by the end of this month (April). As a result we will stop adding new features to Cobalt 8 core engine. It means that if change of the code leads to more stable version we apply it if not, we add it to Cobalt 9.

Although we may release some fields, modules, comment adapters or integrations. Above statement apples only to Cobalt core engine.

Cobalt 8 to Cobalt 9 Updates

I am sure this is the first question that come in to your mind. And this is good news. It is going to be as easy as update from Cobalt 8.112 to Cobalt 8.113. Update from cobalt 7 to Cobalt 8 was complicated mostly due to switch from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3.0 along with Cobalt 7 - 8 update. But Cobalt 9 will be made for Joomla 3.x series be it 3.0, 3.1 or 3.5 version.

New features

• JIP - Just In Place is a technology that allow to edit any field without editing whole article. This is not only makes editing easier, it opens new possibilities for access rights. For example you will be able to have moderators that are able to edit only 1 or 2 fields in article but not able to edit whole article.

• Analytics - may be some of you remember Mighty Analytics. this is something like that but built into cobalt. Simple front-end interface to show charts and tables of data in section. This also includes search log history.

• ACL - Joomla core ACL integration. That sounds surprising like "What? It is till not there?". Well, it is, but not fully. We actively use acceslevel and you can manage who can do what quite flexible. But we want to make it even more flexible and intuitive.

• SSI - Some improvements to SSI. New gateways like Authorize.net and moneybookers (Skrill). New fields donations and buy now for tangible products. Printable invoice view. In addition may be cart or may be balance system not yet sure.

• SEO - Better SEO. Set of parameters how to format page titles, default meta information.

Optimisation

• Ajax page navigation - We will get rid of page link navigation and will load list of article along scrolling.

• Ajax filer apply The previous feature opens new possibilities. Since we can load pages with ajax, why not user it to apply advanced search? This will increase speed and lower server load.

I would place this feature first, because it is one of our main priorities. But I placed it at the bottom after you have read everything above, so you can understand more.

Because of Ajax page navigation and Ajax filer apply features we expect server load goes down at least 20% and up to 50% which is huge believe me. And let me explain how.

Every time Cobalt loads list of the article it runs queries. On some pages from 50 to 150 depending on configuration. But 30 queries of those are used for creating filters (including counting), category index, pagination, alphas index and so on. In fact with simplest configuration it requires only 7-10 queries to load only list of the records. So when you load records with AJAX you only query records and not all those categories, filters and other things again and again which actually takes most of the memory and CPU time.

Another things with Ajax page navigation is that we do not actually need to get total of the records. Because it was only used to create pagination. Now you can decide if you need it or not and it will be used only for text display under the list. And total calculation also one of the heaviest query in Cobalt.

Another optimisation is fields key. Right now it is text but we will change it to integer. Study made by one of our client (Sackgesicht) had shown that we can improve performance for advanced search with filters up to 200%.

Other

Those are just few new things we plan to implement in Cobalt 9. But there are already hundreds of small adjustments and features in our list that are not listed here.

When?

Well, as usually I do not know. We do plan it for end of summer but as practice shows we always delay. But we want it to be there by the Joomla 3.5 release.