Life easier? Updating from Joomla 2.5.28 with Fabrik 3.2 to JOOMLA 3.6.4 and Fabrik 3.5.1

[isiway]

Hello,

realy getting into FABRIK again


For 2 years we have been successfully using FABRIK (now Version 3.2) in a JOOMLA (Version 2.5.28) to manage a database of certain materials in 5 languages. Thanks for the great component!

Now we are in the process of relaunching JOOMLA to the newest Version 3.6.4 and to evaluate whether

- the switching to FABRIK 3.5.1 will cause any problems and

- which advantages / changes the new Fabrik 3.5.1 version will bring, will it make life easier to administrate the many lists/ views main and sub lists?


In order to make the decision and to convince the customer in have some questions:


Situation:

The (big) material database (list) is holding partly secret information !

- some entries in the list and also some elements and are not public, the are only accessible for certain usergroups (super user, sales, laboratory etc.)

- in the past in order to manage the different views lists as copies oft he main lsit with prefilters were created

o the admin material list which shows all to super users, also they can edit

o a sales material list as a copy/view of the above for sales which
? allows only certain entries (controlled by a prefilter of he list)
? allows to see only certain elements
? no input via form

o a public material list prefiltered more strictly regarding entries and elements.


Also for managing different languages views, the lists have been copied to be able to change the labels of the elements to another language.


So we have a lot of lists! the main admin list and many other copies/ views in the system plus sublists for dropdowns etc.


Questions

With the current version of FABRIK will that be in any aspect easier, less complex?

Is there a way to create the different views only in one list or will we have as many lists as we have usergroups/ languages?

So what changes/ work are/ is to be expected / are nessecary when switiching JOOMLA/ FABRIK to he newest Versions?


Please describe shortly?


Thank you very much!


Kind regards from Germany, ISIWAY (CAROLA)

 

[troester]

If you are already running Fabrik3.2 on Joomla2.5 (which was supported but not "recommended"; since Fabrik3.4 Joomla2.5 is not longer supported at all) it should be no problem to update Fabrik; date formats, element access setting etc. should be ok already.
http://fabrikar.com/forums/index.php?wiki/migrating-fabrik3-0-9-to-fabrik3-1-j-3-4/

But with Joomla3.x you'll need a Joomla template supporting bootstrap (BS2 like the Protostar template coming with Joomla3) and the Fabrik list/form/details bootstrap templates.
So if you are using custom Fabrik templates you have to create new ones starting withcopies of the recent Fabrik ones.

I would:

• create a copy of your site (e.g. with Akeeba backup) for testing the updates !!
• edit Fabrik connections (open + resave so Fabrik knows about the new DB)
• disable Fabrik system/content/scheduled task plugin
• rename the Fabrik template folders (components/com_fabrik/views/xxx/tmpl to e.g. components/com_fabrik/views/xxx/tmpl-old, xxx=list, form, details)
• update Joomla (see the Joomla site for updating from J!2.5 to J!3.6.x )
• install or update to Fabrik3.5.1

Multiple lists:
I can't remember if it was already in Fabrik3.2...

You can set prefilters in menu settings, so no need to copy a list only because of different prefilters
You can set add/edit/view access for elements

But if you have a lot of different element access settings, maybe different access to list and form plugins etc. it may be still easier to have a list copy where you can disable element, unpublish plugins...

Multilanguage:
Meanwhile Fabrik is running all list/form/element labels, messages etc. through FText resp. JText, so translating these texts.
So you can have one list and use custom language constants for these labels and messages.
You have to add it to the language overrides (which is a bit painful) or you can edit the override files in ../language\overrides directly (it's just text)

There should be somewhere a WIKI about how to combine this automatically with a Fabrik table for editing and translating the texts and a thread about how to load custom language files - I can't find them at the moment.

So yes, you should be able to reduce your lists but...

 

[cheesegrits]

Another important consideration is security. We have fixed a number of security issues with Fabrik since 3.2, including a "well known" (to the hacking community) SQL injection vulnerability. The longer you run 3.2, the more likely you are to get hacked.

-- hugh

 

[isiway]

Hello Hugh,

thanks for your detailed answers. That sounds good! Also for the information about the security issue.

Questions

• Security: Since it is a big site and the relaunch to Joomla 3 and Fabrik 3.5.1 (and all other extensions) will take a while, is there any patch I could do meanwhile in the current Fabrik 3.2 system?

If you look in our old conversations the following problem "Link from a result list with parameter" was never solved. The request was the following:

• Page with fabrik filter -> OK
  
• showing results of material -OK
• the last column is the ID of the material, that should be a link to a form (RSFORMs) transfering the material ID like www.xyz.de?material=4711 to the form. Somehow we never managed to do this...

Will the new version show the search parameters in front of the result?

Thanks again,
Regards, Carola

 

[cheesegrits]

No, can't really patch it. Well, it would be possible, but would require me to go through several thousand commits on github to figure out which ones are needed, and manually merge those into a custom branch, and resolve all the dependency issues where the changes in those commits rely on other changes in earlier commits. Which would have to be billable work, probably in four figures.

Can you dig up the thread you are talking about? I think I vaguely remember, but need to see the original discussion.



Sent from my HTC 10 using Tapatalk