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Frontend Submission and Editing

The ZOO 2.1 Frontend Submission blog post already covered the number one ZOO 2.1 feature extensively. But here is a quick roundup.

The brand new frontend submission for ZOO allows you to create submissions for any content type of your ZOO apps. For example authors can submit articles or the latest movie reviews. It can also be used as a form builder for any kind of form, e.g. a contact form. You can easily customize what content is submittable by drag 'n drop. Not only submissions by registered users even public submissions are possible. We have a beautiful submission interface and a new, polished ZOO administration area. A "My Submissions" view enables your users to review and edit their submitted items again. To achieve frontend editing for items we introduced the "Trusted Mode". For non trusted users a new feature that made it into the final version is the spam protection. Users are only allowed to post every five minutes in none trusted mode. This removes the threat of being spammed by submissions. Take a look at the ZOO 2.1 Frontend Submission blog post to learn more about all the details.
New Importers

With our ZOO 2.1 release, we have not only updated the K2 and Joomla importers, but we have also included two brand new importers. You can now import data from Docman and Mosets Tree. This will make it much easier for you, to give ZOO a try. Simply install ZOO, import data from your existing installation and take ZOO for a spin. ZOO is not to your taste? Uninstall it, no harm done. That's not going to happen though, right ;-)

But there is more - much anticipated was the release of our CSV importer. Now, you can basically import data from any program supporting CSV export. That's really neat, right? Your customer wants a rework of its old website running a different CMS? You can now migrate data from the old website to your new ZOO installation.

CSV Importer

Here is how it works. Basically you can import any number of items and any number of data columns into the following ZOO elements: Text, Textarea, Link, Email, Date, Image and Download. Now that's what you would expect anyway, right? But you can also import those items into existing or none existing categories. You simply assign one or more columns to the category field and the importer will try to match the categories name to existing categories. If there is no category with this name, it will automatically be created. Do you have data that needs to be stored in a repeatable element? You can accomplish this by assigning multiple columns to the same element. The importer will handle the data in the order of the columns.
New Menu Itemid Handling

One of the highlights of the new ZOO 2.1 is the link handling. We have included a new router to help with building links. It will search the Joomla menu and figure out which Menu Item to activate. Also, if you browse through your categories it will now remember the category you came from in the breadcrumbs. If you visit the item from a direct link, the new primary category will be shown in the breadcrumb.
Canonical Links (SEO)

In Joomla we've always had problems with multiple links linking to the same content (Duplicate Content). We've got rid of those problems by introducing canonical links now. Each item has a canonical link in the page header, that hints search engines to the original resource. Therefore the canonical link is the link returned by the search result. It consolidates those multiple links to your preferred version and hereby increases your link popularity.
Updated Google Maps Element

And more...

How to upgrade ZOO 2.0 to 2.1

You can simply install the new ZOO 2.1 over your old ZOO 2.0.x. Isn't this awesome? But first of all make a backup of your old site (files and database), so you can recover it any time. If you do the update process, you'll have to reassign submittable elements to the submission layout.