This beta has been 4 months in the making, and we understand some of you have been waiting impatiently. You know, we have a mantra over here at Joomlatools : our software will be ready when it’s ready. We don’t enjoy making you wait, but we take great pride in releasing Joomla extensions that are engineered for easy of use, long-term stability and performance.

Key Features

The DOCman 2.0 Beta 3 includes all features mentioned in our previous DOCman 2.0 Alpha Blog Post and Beta Blog Post, plus the following exciting new features.

1. Document Image and Auto Thumbnail functionality

We integrated the DOCman Thumbs functionality. DOCman 2 is now capable of generating thumbnails of your documents on the fly, if possible. Thumbnails can be manually regenerated and cleared. You can also upload your own document images instead of generating a thumbnail.

After saving your document with the automatically generate image option selected the thumbnail will appear.

2. Download and preview behavior changes

Before, DOCman used to have separate Preview and Download buttons, but as of Beta 3 we no longer have a Preview button. Instead, DOCman is no longer force downloading documents, it leaves this up to the browser to decide how to handle the document: either display it or download it.

With support for PDF reading in modern browsers like Chrome and Firefox 15+ this also means people can easily read PDF files in the browser and additionally this changes solves problems with file downloads on mobile devices.

We also added improved support for Google Viewer. If Google Viewer is enabled it will show a preview of the following supported document types. Here is an example of using Google Preview for a PowerPoint presentation.

3. Menu item changes

The ‘All Categories’ and the ‘Single Category’ views have been merged into one ‘List’ view option.

The list view allows you to select any category to use as the base category from where documents will be shown. You can choose to include child categories or not.

4. Access Level Inheritance improvements

We further improved the document and categories access level inheritance. The actual access level is now being calculated on the fly and gets displayed in the edit form and list views. With this change you no longer need to set access permissions for each document and/or category which makes managing your permissions a lot easier.

5. Improved SEF Routing

We reworked the integrated SEF routing to improve readability and fixed a number of bugs. This gives better readable and simple URL’s. To get the file attached to a document now just add /file to the end of the document URL.

6. Added Support for Video and Audio Streaming

Video and audio files can now be streamed. If your browser can play the video or audio file it will do so.  Most modern browsers and mobile browsers can do this.

For example, if you upload an MP4 video file to your site, your browser will be able to start playing the file using its built-in video support, if available. A great example of this would be to head over to our DOCman 2.0 Demo Site and upload an MP4 video file and create a DOCman Document for it and then check things out in the frontend.

If you’re feeling adventurous, try accessing the video from your iPhone and watch your video start streaming instantly!

What’s next ?

We’re currently working full force on DOCman 2.0 Beta 4, which will include Joomla 3 compatibility. At the same time we will be releasing final Release Candidates for LOGman, FILEman and EXTman that will also include Joomla 3.0 compatibility!

Migration from DOCman 1.x will not be available until DOCman 2 is feature complete and will be part of our first Release Candidate (which will most likely be released after Beta 4).

The DOCman 2.0 Beta is available to all Joomlatools Club members. Not yet a member? Get a subscription and take the new DOCman 2.0 Beta for a spin today!

DOCman 2 beta is now ready for testing. Is it production ready? We think so! Some of our customers are already using it in production without problems. We still plan to release two more beta’s before DOCman 2 will be feature complete.

Key Features

The DOCman 2.0 Beta includes all features mentioned in our previous DOCman 2.0 Alpha Blog Post, plus these exciting new features:

1. We improved the administrator document filtering to make it easier to find recently created and edited documents. Various document state filters (published, unpublished, pending, etc.) have also been added.

2. Document and category access rights can now be inherited. You will find a new ‘inherit’ option in the access group settings. With this change you no longer need to set access permissions for each document and/or category which makes managing your permissions a lot easier.

3. The file uploader has been redesigned and improved. We increased the drag and drop area and added a ‘choose file button’ to make selecting files easier and quicker.

4. Publish/unpublish dates can now be set for documents to automatically publish or unpublish a document on your site.

5. ‘Save & New’ buttons have been added to the category manager to make it easier to quickly add categories when setting up your repository.

6. The document populate functionality has been simplified. The populate icon has been removed and its functionality integrated into the ‘Create Documents’ workflow available within the File Manager, making it fast and easy to add multiple files into a category!

7. We added a new ‘Register or Login to Download‘ configuration option. When enabled guests are able to see the download button but are redirected to the login page before downloading.

8. Categories now support category sorting in the frontend. You can sort categories by title, ordering or by created date.

9. Separate permissions for ‘view’ and ‘download‘ have been added. You can now define which user groups can only see the documents information and who can download the attached files.

10. Tons of smaller changes, user interface improvement and fixes…

What’s next ?

We’re currently wrapping up Beta 3 to fix more issues and introduce a few more features. After Beta 3 we are planning one more beta before releasing the first release candidate.

Beta 4 will include Joomla 3 compatibility. At the same time we will be releasing final release candidates for LOGman, FILEman and EXTman that will also include Joomla 3.0 compatibility!

The DOCman 2.0 Beta is available to all Joomlatools Club members. Not yet a member? Get a subscription and take the new DOCman 2.0 Beta for a spin today!

This maintenance release brings a many bufg fixes and also includes 3 new features.  Here is an overview of the new features we added :

What’s new

1. View only access for documents

DOCman 1.6.7 now includes ‘view’ only access for documents. To turn on ‘view’ access you need to set the frontend guest access to ‘browse only’ in the DOCman configuration. The  download buttons will then be redirected to the login page.

2. Support for menu metadata and title options

We have added support for the menu metadata (description and keywords) and title options that where introduced in Joomla 2.5. You can set them per menu item and DOCman will then add them to every page of that menu item.

3. Use Unicode SEF slugs

DOCman will generate Unicode slugs if this option is enabled in the Joomla SEF configuration settings. This allows you to have multi-lingual SEF url’s for your DOCman categories and documents.

More information about the new releases and a complete list of all the changes can be found in our DOCman change-logs.

Learn More

If you want to learn more about DOCman, go to our product page or check out Joomla 2.5  demo site.

DOCman is available to all our Joomlatools subscribers through our Member Center. Not yet a member? Subscribe today and get access to all our extensions.

This new maintenance release brings many fixes and one new feature : ‘view access for documents’.

View only access for documents allows users to browse documents without the ability to download them.  To turn on ‘view’ access you need to set the frontend guest access to ‘browse only’ in the DOCman configuration. The  download buttons will then be redirected to the login page.

More information about the new release and a list of all bug fixes can be found in our DOCman change-logs.

Learn More

If you want to learn more about DOCman, go to our product page or check out Joomla 2.5  demo site.

DOCman is available to all our Joomlatools subscribers through our Member Center. Not yet a member? Subscribe today and get access to all our extensions.

FILEman upload dialog box with drag and drop zone

This new release candidate brings a ton of fixes and a heap of new features.  Here are some of them worth highlighting:

• Drag and drop support got a complete overhaul, we added a nice big drop zone to drop files onto, files can also be dropped right on the files listing view.
• The whole UI has been refactored to use Twitter Bootstrap and we refactored our javascript to use jQuery. This makes FILEman forward compatible with Joomla 3.0.
• We have added a super fast caching solution to make the UI even snappier in the backend, the cache will auto refresh itself and can also be manually refreshed.
• On the frontend we added file submission support, to allow you to use FILEman to easily setup a file dropbox on your site.
• Google Analytics support has been added. When turned on file downloads will be tracked out of the box. No extra setup required.
• and lots more… view the changelog

Learn More

If you want to learn more about FILEman, go to our product page or check out Joomla 1.5 and 2.5  demo sites.

FILEman works on both Joomla 1.5 and 2.5. Upgrading from FILEman 1.0 RC3 is as simple as installing it without uninstalling.

FILEman is available to all our Joomlatools subscribers through our Member Center. Not yet a member? Subscribe today and get access to all our extensions.