Now onto business. We're extremely excited to announce the release of AdminPraise2 Beta! We learned a LOT with AdminPraise1, and have rolled all that experience and feedback into something that will truly change the day-to-day lives of Joomla administrators. Here's a quick rundown of some of the great features:
- 6 Awesome Themes - we spent lots of time creating 6 different experiences based off Adobe, Joomla, Apple, WordPress, Microsoft, and Gmail. Find the theme that's familiar and settle in to your new home.
- Dynamic Sidebar - we decided to go with 1 sidebar for AP2, as almost no monitor was really wide enough for 3 useful columns. The sidebar comes with 9 module positions. For each module in a given position, a new tab will appear. Pressed for space? Condense the sidebar and each module will become a vertical list of tabs which will reveal a hovering div. Still pressed for space? Totally turn off the sidebar.
- AP Menu -we liked our menu choices from AP1 but missed the dropdown menu, so we combined them. That's not all, our menu module is utilizing the Joomla menu system! That's right, you can now edit the AP menu in the menu manager, and change, reorder, add, edit, or delete links as you would in any Joomla menu!
- AP Quicklaunch - The Component Quicklaunch is back, but it's bundled with a Module Quicklaunch as well! You can choose if you want to display links to the Site Modules, Admin Modules, or both!
- AP Icons Module - we created a module that has icon links to just about everything you want to do in the admin site. During the install process, we duplicate the module and configure it as we would use it. Don't like our settings? Simply edit each module and decide what you'd like to display!
- AP Dock - If you're a fan of the OSX Dock, you can access links to popular admin tasks via the new AP Dock!
- Activity Log - AP2 comes bundled with our new Acitivty Log module, which is a module/plugin combo that will track all the latest admin activity from all admins and keep you updated with everyone's activity.
- More Breadcrumbs! - Our History Breadcrumbs are back, but now have an entire row so you can display more of these super useful crumbs.
- MyEditor Module - Quickly change your WYSIWYG text editor setting via this dropdown and save clicks!
- Helpful Links - We've put together some great time-saving links such as 1-click links to add New Sections, Categories, Articles, Menus and Users, along with links to quickly filter by logged in users, published modules, and many more...
I think that's enough babbling, it's obvious that we're excited about this release.
Lastly, I want to mention that AP2 will be optimized for Firefox and Safari. Certain features like css rounded corners will only display on browsers running Gecko or Webkit. We're currently chasing down some IE JavaScript bugs. AP2 will run on IE, we just recommend using Firefox or Safari if possible. After all, if you're a Joomla Administrator, you're now a web developer and these should be your browsers of choice
[Download AdminPraise2 Beta (Subscribers Only)]
This is a Beta release and will have bugs. Please submit any bugs to the AP2 forum. (though we'd really appreciate it if you hold off the posts until tomorrow so we can enjoy the rest of Valentine's Day w/our loved ones)
