Today we present you the eagerly awaited ZOO 2.5 BETA release. With this release the ZOO got refurbished quite a bit. It revamps elements and jazzes them up with the Widgetkit goodness. That also means that we are saying “good bye” to the ZOOtools, they will be replaced by their Widgetkit equivalents. Furthermore we are discarding the remaining MooTools scripts. Read all about the changes in the following sections.
Widgetkit
Quite a few elements make use of the Widgetkit features now. The Image element features a fancy spotlight and a new lightbox. The Video element got replaced by the new Media element, that lets you present videos and audio with the power of HTML5. The Gallery element was completely revamped to work similar to the Widgetkit Gallery. Last but not least there is a new Widgetkit element, that lets you choose any Widget to be displayed in your items content.
Warp 6
The blog app now features a new template called "Warp6". It fully integrates with any of our Warp6 themes and matches perfectly their overall style. This makes the ZOO look especially neat and styled!
Item Ordering
A feature that has always been missing was the ability to order items by elements. Well, without further ado, now you can! You want to present your customers with ordered events? You want to order your products by their color or their size? You want to order your movies by their rating? The new release enables you to do lots of cool new stuff.
Social Buttons
In favor of the new and shiny Social Buttons element, we've kicked the Socialbookmarks element and the Facebook Like element. Now there are three buttons you can choose from. The Tweet button, the Google +1 button and the Facebook Like or Recommend button. Let everyone share your ZOO content!
Replacing XML with JSON
This one is a bit more techie. We have replaced quite a bit of XML with JSON. The elements e.g. are now stored in JSON. This makes it much easier for others to develop custom elements. It also makes for some speed improvements. In general handling JSON is much easier, than handling XML. Because of this change we've dumped the XML im-/export and replaced it with a JSON im-/export. This made the new comments im-/export rather easy to develop.
Important Upgrade Information
Please make sure to backup prior to the upgrade. Keep in mind: There is no smooth upgrade path for custom elements. All custom elements will need to be updated or removed prior or after upgrade! As stated above, the ZOOtools will be removed by this update. Please also make sure to install the latest Widgetkit version. Where applicable the Video element will be converted to the new Media element by this update. Because of the changes to the Gallery element, you'll loose your data associated to the Gallery element.
What's next?
The ZOO 2.5 BETA is exclusively available for members only who purchased the ZOO app bundle. As soon as ZOO 2.5 goes STABLE, it will be released for the public. Members can go straight to the download section in the member area and take ZOO 2.5 BETA for a spin! Be aware that it is a BETA version. It is not intended to be used on a production web site just yet.
Please give us your feedback and tell us what you think!
