What’s new in News Show Pro GK5 v.1.7.0?

Last week we released version 1.7.0 of our News Show Pro GK5 module, which brings with it a whole lot of improvements that we’re sure will be very useful for this module’s users. We’ll take a look at some of the biggest and most important additions below.

nsp

Here’s something quite interesting: two of the important changes in this release were implemented as a direct result of discussions I had during my lecture at the JoomlaDay™ Poland event in Warsaw, so I’d like to say thank you to all who participated for their great feedback and ideas; it’s really helped me get a better picture of what our users want :)

URL overrides

This is probably the most longed for change in the module – I’ve personally received many requests for implementation of this feature, however, actually implementing it isn’t very easy. Instead, we have prepared a solution that may be used by more advanced users to allow them the additional freedom that URL overrides provides.

ATTENTION!! If you want your URLs to override, you’ll need to switch on the Use URL overrides option in the External files tab of the template options.

Overriding URLs are created in the url_overrides.json file which has the following structure:

{
    "data_source_name_1": {
        "ID_1": "OVERRIDED_URL_1",
        "ID_2": "OVERRIDED_URL_2",
        …
        "ID_N": "OVERRIDED_URL_N"
    },
    "data_source_name_2": {
        …
    },
    …
}

So in order to override a URL in an article that has an ID that equals 10 from the com_content component, you’d use the following code:

{
    "com_content": {
        "10": "https://www.gavick.com"
    }
}

This solution is perfect for displaying specific article content but using a different linking structure e.g. in a portfolio, we may display the list of projects by pulling from articles, but the links may lead directly to websites displaying the final result of the project rather than the article itself.

Portal mode override

All portal modes were moved to a tmpl/portal_modes catalog, and with the latest module code modifications, from now on, it will be possible to override them directly in your own themes – including overriding the PHP file as well as the JS and CSS files.

With these changes, modifications implemented to serve a particular theme’s needs or focus will not be lost after the module is updated.

K2 – First article image may now be selected

In the additional settings section of the module, when setting the data source as K2 and choosing the base image size, we’ve added the ability to choose the first image from the images in the article content as the base image for generating thumbnails.

K2 – support for PNG images

K2 by default supports images in JPG format for featured images, but there are some plugins that add support for images in PNG format – for this reason, we’ve added support for them to the module in order to make it easier to implement transparency effects in the K2 component.

Full list of changes

For a full list of the changes, including minor fixes, head over to our updates section for your chosen version of NSP:

What’s next?

We are constantly working on News Show Pro GK5 module development; in fact, we’re already hard at work on version 1.7.1 which will include extended support for JomSocial, module improvements that are required for our next theme release, and more bug fixes for any bugs that rear their ugly head between releases.

We’re always happy to get feedback on our modules, and we encourage you to drop in on our Github repository and let us know of any bugs you’ve encountered and what features or improvements you’d like to see in future versions of NSP – a lot of the improvements and features we’ve implemented were added as a direct result of the feedback our users provided, so please do make your voice heard, we are listening!