2024 September Product Updates

As we move through the year's final quarter, we’re excited to share new features, important fixes, and security updates across our Joomla extensions. This month brings powerful integrations, AI-powered tools, and key enhancements that simplify website management.

Convert Forms

This month, we’ve focused on bringing several exciting improvements and new features to your favorite Joomla contact form manager. These updates are designed to give you more flexibility, better integration options, and enhanced privacy and control over form submissions. Here are the key highlights:

MailerLite Integration

We’ve added full integration between Convert Forms and MailerLite. Now, when someone submits a form on your site, you can automatically subscribe them to one or more groups in your MailerLite account.

Here’s what you can do with the new integration:

• Add subscribers to multiple groups at the same time.
• Decide whether to update an existing record or fail the submission if the email address is already in MailerLite.
• Set the subscriber status (Active, Unsubscribed, Unconfirmed, Bounced, or Junk).
• Map form fields to MailerLite fields, making saving extra information like name, age, or company easy.
• Execute the integration only under specific conditions, such as adding a subscriber to MailerLite only if a certain option is selected in the form.

This new integration complements Convert Forms’ connections with 20+ popular apps, including MailChimp, HubSpot, Brevo, Active Campaign, and more. For further details on setting up MailerLite integration, visit the documentation page.

Support for Custom Fields in User Account and Content Apps

We’ve expanded the integration with Joomla’s User and Content components by adding support for custom fields. Now, you can create a user account via a custom registration form in Convert Forms and populate user custom fields. Similarly, when creating Joomla articles via the front end, you can pre-fill the title, description, and any custom fields attached.

For example, you can use Convert Forms to manage fields with single or multiple values, giving you more flexibility in content management. While fields requiring advanced values, like Subform, Media, ACF Address, or ACF File Upload, are not supported yet, we plan to include them in future releases. 

{all_fields} Filter to Exclude Hidden Fields

This update is for you if you use conditional logic in your forms. Previously, the {all_fields} Smart Tag would display all fields, even those hidden by conditional logic. This didn’t always make sense and could clutter the Thank-You message.

Now, by using the new filter --excludeHiddenByLogic=true with the {all_fields} tag, you can ensure that only the fields visible to the user at the time of submission are shown in the Thank-You message. This makes the form data clearer and more relevant for you and your users. To learn more about how to use this filter, visit the documentation.

Improved PDF Filename Privacy

We’ve made an important privacy improvement regarding PDFs generated by form submissions. Previously, the filename of each PDF included the submission ID, which raised privacy concerns as it could expose the number of submissions a form had and allow someone to access any submission’s PDF by guessing the filename.

Starting from version 4.4.6, this is no longer the case. Now, a random string is added to the end of the filename instead of the submission ID, making it harder for anyone to guess or access the PDF files. If you’d like to learn more about generating PDFs based on user-submitted data, read more in the documentation.

Advanced Custom Fields

This month, we’ve worked on two key improvements in Advanced Custom Fields to improve the efficiency of handling media files and Gravatar fields.

Improved Handling of Gallery and File Upload Fields for Copied or Deleted Articles

If you’re using the Gallery or File Upload Fields in your articles, this update addresses an important issue when copying or deleting articles. Previously, when you copied an article with these fields, the files and photos seemed to be copied. However, they were just referenced from the original article. If you removed a file from the original article, it would also disappear from the copied article.

We’ve fixed this by properly copying all media assets to the new article. Now, each article will have its own set of files, completely independent of the original.

Additionally, we’ve tackled the issue of orphaned files when an article is deleted. Previously, if you deleted an article containing a photo gallery or uploaded files, those media files would remain on your server, taking up unnecessary storage space. With this update, when you delete an article, all associated files in the Gallery and File Upload Fields are also removed, keeping your file system clean.

Support for Smile Pack Smart Tags in the Gravatar Field

The Gravatar Custom Field allows you to display the Gravatar image associated with an email address. Previously, this field only accepted input from direct email addresses. Now, with the latest update, you can also use Smile Pack Smart Tags to generate email addresses for Gravatars dynamically.

For example, you can now enter the Smart Tag {sp article user.email}, which returns the email address of the article’s author, and the field will display the corresponding gravatar. This gives you more flexibility in using the Gravatar field in your articles.

New Feature: AI-Generated ALT Text for Photo Galleries in Advanced Custom Fields and Smile Pack extensions

We’re excited to introduce a time-saving AI-powered feature for managing gallery image descriptions. Keeping up with ALT text for large image collections can be a hassle, especially when manually inputting each description. We’ve added AI-generated ALT text functionality to both the Advanced Custom Fields Gallery Field and the Smile Pack Gallery Module to simplify this process.

With just a single click, this new feature will automatically generate descriptive ALT text for your images, helping you improve accessibility and SEO without the usual effort. Whether you’re handling a few images or a large gallery, this tool makes the process quicker and easier.

While many are jumping on the AI bandwagon, we’re happy to join in — making it fun and effortless for you to manage your photo galleries!

Check out our latest blog post for more details on using this feature and creating a photo gallery in Joomla.

Security Update: File Upload Security Bypass Fixed

In October, we addressed a minor security issue affecting the file upload mechanisms across several extensions. This vulnerability allowed someone to bypass file type restrictions, potentially disguising a file, such as a PDF, as another format, like a JPG. While this issue was not critical, we immediately acted to fix it and ensure your data remains secure.

The following extensions and their respective features were affected:

• Convert Forms – File Upload Field
• Advanced Custom Fields – File Upload Field
• Advanced Custom Fields – Gallery Field
• Smile Pack – Gallery Module

With the latest update, the file type restrictions now work as expected, blocking any attempts to upload files under a false format. To benefit from this security fix, we recommend updating the latest versions of these extensions.