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Joomlatools Year-In-Review: 2020 the fastest year on record

This was the strangest of years for most of us with vast swathes of the planet in lock-down, at one time or another, the days seem to have fused into one and 2020 has flown by.

Before we go on to talk about the achievements and high-lights of the year here at Joomlatools we'd like to take a moment and reflect upon one of our era's most tumultuous years, we'd like to pause, pay our respects and give our condolences to the many victims of COVID-19 around the world. Hopefully, with the combined might of mankind's scientific mind, the many vaccines that are being developed will soon enable the whole world to rebuild anew.

We’re vastly grateful to you, our customers and visitors, for being with us on this journey and helping us close an unprecedented year on a strong note.

So, join us as we take a look back at 2020 and all that we experienced in helping our customers brave the worst of the global crisis and going digital transition.

2020, the fastest year on record

Although it seemed like half of the Western world was furloughed, we ploughed on here at Joomlatools with the important task of maintaining and improving our best-in-class enterprise-grade extensions for Joomla. Each member of the family, DOCman, FILEman, LEADman, LOGman and TEXTman, as well as our unique SaaS service Connect, received the same love and attention.

LOGman

2020 has definitely been LOGman's year, we finally brought smart reliable logging for Joomla to your website toolkit with LOGman's game-changing smart-logging feature. In a nut-shell, LOGman can now decide to ignore website requests that aren't made by humans. LOGman can generate symbiotic analytics logs for DOCman, FILEman and TEXTman, if you can log it properly you can analyse it properly.

One of the handiest tools we added to LOGman is the ability to log configuration changes, the easiest way to break a site is to change the configuration and forget what the previous setting was, that's no longer a concern. LOGman will log the configuration changes and provide information about the exact setting that was changed, who changed it, when was it changed and importantly what the previous value for that setting was, in case you need to roll the changes back.

DOCman

Back in the summer we added an image slider and video downloads to DOCman, even earlier in the year you were introduced to DOCman for WordPress, the first stable version of which went live in November but more on that later.

LEADman

Our contact management and lead generation extension became fully GDPR compliant. Once you install LEADman on your site, unlike Global aviation giant British Airways, you won't have to worry when the Information Commissioner's Office shouts "Captain Data Forgot the Phasers".

TEXTman

When your site has our Connect plugin installed you'll find our powerful new image editor embedded within TEXTman's featured image panel, just click on the edit button to fire it up. The image editor is available in DOCMan and FILEman too when Connect is installed.

FILEman

FILEman 3.3, released in August, saw an image slider and download improvements added to its core functionality, with symbiotic activities logs if your site also has LOGman installed.

Developer tools

At Joomlatools we're dyed-in-the-wool converts to the concept of "work smarter, not harder", we call it lazy coding and we love to spread our philosophy to other developers. To do that we frequently build and release tools to the development community to help them become lazy by working smarter, not harder - no one ever innovated by trying to reinvent the wheel, right?

The tools that we contributed to the developers' arsenal this year included: Joomlatools Vagrant 1.6, Gitpod for Joomla, Mason and last but-by-no-means least, Pages, our engine for creating websites in a dynamic, lazy and smart way.

2021, a year we're really look forward to

2020 was a wild ride, and it’s left everyone wondering what 2021 has in store for us.

While we can’t be certain about what world affairs will look like this year (fingers crossed for the best), we can say with confidence that Joomlatools will keep breaking barriers of innovation and performance, so you can stay on top of your Joomla game.

DOCman for WordPress

We're really excited about venturing into the WordPress world. DOCMan for WordPress v1.1 has already been internally released, at the end of last year, and we are confident that over the coming year DOCman will become the best enterprise-grade document management solution for over half of all CMS-powered websites on the internet.

TEXTman 4.0

We are also very excited about the upcoming TEXTman 4.0 release, which will finalise a four-year effort in building the best article editor for Joomla. TEXTman began life as a simple frontend article editor, but, over the last couple of years thanks to user feedback it's matured and has evolved into the only content extension you'll need in order to manage your Joomla articles.

Joomlatools Pages

2021 will be the year that website performance will really start to matter. Google has confirmed that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor in May 2021 and Pages is all ready for it!

We spent the entirety of 2020 working on caching and performance improvements for Pages, ready to be rolled out to the Joomla community early next year. 2021 will be the year of super-fast Joomla websites!

Stay safe, and here’s to a healthy and prosperous 2021!