2024 August Product Updates - What’s Coming Next

As we wrap up August, we know this month has been slower, with much of the world taking a well-deserved break. Our team has also taken this time to recharge, so this month’s product releases focused more on maintenance and bug fixes than new features. However, the work behind the scenes never stops, and we’ve got some exciting plans for the rest of the year that we’ll share shortly.

What’s New in August

Here’s a quick rundown of the improvements and fixes we rolled out this past month:

• Convert Forms: Fixed an issue with the PDF Form Submissions Addon where the PDF Filename Prefix could not handle non-Latin characters.
• Google Structured Data: The Product Schema now supports Weight and Weight Unit properties, enhancing SEO data for e-commerce sites.
• EngageBox: Resolved errors with the Conditional Content Shortcode when the content included the word ‘if’ and an odd number of quotes.
• Advanced Custom Fields: Fixed Several adjustments for the Video Field and Yootheme Integration, ensuring smoother functionality and compatibility.
• Smile Pack: Resolved an issue where links in the PayPal Button Module description were not working properly.

If you missed our previous updates, check out the July 2024 and June 2024 Product Updates for a comprehensive look at our recent enhancements.

What’s Coming for the Rest of 2024

While August may have been light on features, we’re gearing up for an exciting few months ahead. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s in store for our products for the rest of 2024.

Convert Forms

Convert Forms remains a favorite among Joomla users, ranking #2 in the top-rated extensions with over 840 reviews. Known as the easiest contact form builder in the market, it’s about to get even better. We’re planning several exciting new features, including the ability to map form fields to custom fields in Joomla Articles and User forms, a highly requested integration with MailerLite, and continued work on the much-anticipated Multi-Step Forms feature.

Multi-Step Forms: Progress Update

We understand you’ve been eagerly awaiting the multi-step forms feature, and we want to provide a transparent update. This feature has proven to be more complex than initially anticipated due to the need for extensive refactoring of the form builder. One significant challenge has been ensuring backward compatibility; we aim to introduce multi-step forms without disrupting your existing forms. Balancing these requirements has contributed to the delay. While we’ve faced challenges meeting previous ETA estimates, we’re committed to delivering a fully functional multi-step forms feature. We no longer provide specific ETAs to focus on delivering a high-quality product. In the meantime, we’ve made substantial progress in the UI, particularly in field management, as shown in the photos below. We appreciate your patience and look forward to sharing more as we near completion.

An overview of the form builder

The list of all supported form fields. They are now called Elements.

Element's quick edit options

Batch edit form elements

Editing a form element

Custom Fields support for the Content and User Apps

Convert Forms already integrates with the Joomla Content and Users components, allowing you to create articles and user accounts from the front end using custom forms. Previously, these integrations could not map form fields with custom fields. We’re changing that by introducing the capability to map form fields with custom fields in both integrations. This will greatly enhance the flexibility of creating a custom registration form in Joomla, making it easier to collect and manage user-specific data more accurately.

Connect Convert Forms with MailerLite

By popular demand, we’re adding MailerLite support to our marketing integrations collection. This integration will allow you to easily add users who submit your forms directly to your MailerLite list. Additionally, it will support MailerLite custom fields, groups, and segments, giving you greater control over how you organize and target your subscribers.

EngageBox

Currently ranked #7 in the top-rated extensions with over 520 reviews, EngageBox is the best choice to create popups in Joomla. Here’s what’s in our plans.

More control over popup scheduling

Currently, scheduling a popup to appear weekly or at specific intervals is cumbersome, requiring multiple conditions to be set up (Day, Time, and Date). Things become even more complex if you want a popup to display every X days or months, as this requires custom PHP. To simplify this, we plan to improve the Date condition. This will allow users to easily create schedules for popups, making what was once a complex process straightforward and flexible.

With the new scheduling feature, users will be able to:

• Open a popup every 3 days
• Create a recurring popup only on weekends between 5 PM and 10 PM
• Schedule a popup to appear once a month
• Repeat a popup daily between December 20th and 30th

Grab visitors attention with sound effects

We will also introduce the ability to play a sound when a popup opens. Why is this important? An opening sound can grab attention more effectively, especially on busy websites. It enhances user engagement by creating a sensory cue that encourages visitors to interact with the popup, making it less likely to be ignored. Users can choose from predefined sounds or upload their own, offering flexibility to match their site’s tone or brand.

Smile Pack

We first introduced Smile Pack in February, and it’s been expanding ever since! If you haven’t tried it yet, download the free version and explore our growing collection of modules. Our goal is to make it the most comprehensive set of modules in the market, with options like Video, Map, Gallery, Accordion, and PayPal modules—and these are just the beginning. With more features on the horizon, Smile Pack is here to help you enhance your Joomla site like never before!

Show or hide modules with conditional logic

One limitation of Joomla modules is the need for advanced display rules. Modules are mostly governed by menu item assignments and access level rules. But what if you want to display a module only to mobile users? Or show a module only on weekends, every X days, or based on a user’s geographic location? What if you want to hide a module when the URL contains a specific query string parameter?

These use cases will soon be possible with the upcoming Display Conditions tab. EngageBox and Advanced Custom Fields users will already be familiar with this tab, which allows you to show or hide content based on criteria such as user device, geographic location (country, city), IP address, and date/time. This enhancement won’t just be limited to Smile Pack’s module collection—it will apply to any Joomla module, adding a new level of flexibility to your site.

Increase sales with smart product recommendations

E-commerce sites often face challenges in showcasing products effectively and encouraging higher-order values. We plan to introduce a Products Module to address this by featuring recommendations like Frequently Bought Together, Related Products, Recently Viewed Products, and Best Sellers. This module aims to drive more sales and increase average order values. Supporting major Joomla e-commerce extensions such as VirtueMart, Hikashop, and J2Store, this module will provide a powerful tool to improve your online store’s performance and customer interaction.

Organize large amounts of content with tabs

Many Joomla users need help organizing and navigating large amounts of content on their sites. Existing solutions, like the Accordion Module—great for showcasing FAQs and product features—can become cumbersome with extensive content. To address this, we’re introducing the Tabs Module. This new module will allow you to present related content, such as product specifications or user settings, in a clean, structured, tabbed layout. This approach simplifies navigation and keeps your pages organized, making it easier for users to find and interact with the content they need.

Google Structured Data

Our SEO extension continues to enhance Joomla sites by helping search engines better understand and present your content through structured data. With new features on the way, your site will soon have even more capabilities to stand out in search results and knowledge panels.

Help Google understand your company with Organization Schema Markup

Organization Structured Data helps describe essential details about your business, whether it’s a corporation, NGO, or school. This structured data is typically added to a site’s homepage or about page, containing key information about the organization.

In the past, Google mainly supported Site name, URL, and Logo results for the Organization type, allowing websites to display their logo in search results using the logo and URL properties. Now, Google has significantly expanded the number of properties supported for the Organization type.

In addition to logo and URL, Google now recommends including other properties like name, description, legalName, sameAs, address, duns, taxID, and more. These expanded properties are coming soon to the Organization Schema in our Google Structured Data extension, giving you even more control over how your business is represented in search.

In the October Google Search News Update, John Mueller recommended that SEOs “use a CMS hosting platform or plugin that makes it easy for you to add and remove structured data” to save time and make quick changes. All these updates further demonstrate how important it is to have an agile structured data solution to stay ahead of your competitors.

Advanced Custom Fields

We’re big fans of Joomla Custom Fields! When they were introduced, they pretty much made third-party CCK extensions obsolete. One of our collection's most popular custom fields is the ACF Gallery field, which makes creating photo galleries in Joomla a breeze.

Let AI write photos ALT text

Managing image descriptions for large galleries can be time-consuming, often requiring manual input for each photo. While everyone seems to be jumping on the AI bandwagon, we’re joining the fun too! We’re introducing an AI-powered feature for the ACF Gallery Field that will automatically generate ALT descriptions for your images with a single click. This tool is designed to save you time and effort, making it a breeze to handle extensive image collections.

And don’t worry, we’re not stopping there—this AI magic will also be coming to the Smile Pack Gallery Module. Because if AI is good enough for everyone else, it’s good enough for us!

Conclusion

That’s it for this month’s updates! We know it was a quieter August, but we’ve got some awesome features lined up that we can’t wait for you to try. Whether it’s scheduling popups in EngageBox, using AI for image descriptions, or spicing up your site with new modules, there’s plenty more to come.

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment below if you have any feedback on these updates or if there’s a specific feature you’d like to see in the future. Your input helps shape the direction of our products, so don’t be shy! Let’s make the rest of the year exciting together!