Howdy, everyone? I hope everything is great. To make your time more exciting, today we are releasing the RC (release candidate) version of Helix Ultimate. We are approaching towards the stable release at a good pace. Lots of final touches are being made by our development team. To get your valuable feedback and suggestions, today we’re releasing Helix Ultimate RC. Let’s see what’s inside.
Helix Ultimate release candidate brings a bunch of new features and several improvements in the other brand new features that we’ve introduced in its initial alpha release.
The full changelog is given below:
- Ajax rating (new feature)
- Header variations (new feature)
- Offcanvas Menu position left or right (new feature)
- Badge in menu items (new feature)
- Maintenance mode (new feature)
- Bootstrap 4 stable included
- Override for com content, search, smart search, user, user profile, and contact form
- SCSS to CSS compilation bug fixed
- Blog options known issues fixed, features and layouts improved
- Coming Soon, and Error page bugs fixed
Header variations
Figure: Helix Ultimate header variations.
In the initial alpha release, we promised that we will add header variations to Helix Ultimate. Now you can experience this in today’s RC version. We’ve added 2 header variations to enrich the scope and versatility of the sites powered by Helix Ultimate.
Maintenance mode
Figure: Helix Ultimate maintenance mode.
This new feature will enable you to display a maintenance mode page (e.g. under maintenance, coming soon, site offline or so on) on the frontend of your site. You can customize this page per your needs. A maintenance mode page is required when you want to keep the site temporarily unavailable from the public (basically while performing a crucial system maintenance). Helix Ultimate RC brings dedicated customizable pages for this.
Badge in menu items
You thought of highlighting your most important menu item(s) redirecting to a special page, service, product, announcement but never had the opportunity to do so on your site? With Helix Ultimate RC and onwards, we're giving you the system to highlight your menu items with badges.
Ajax rating
We’ve added Ajax rating feature to the Helix Ultimate RC version (which was not available in its alpha and beta versions). Using this feature, you can enable your visitors to rate website contents in a glimpse of an eye without reloading the page. Helix Ultimate’s Ajax rating feature is bolstered with Joomla CSRF Token for enhanced security. Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a known type of malicious exploit for websites where attackers can use a third-party site to trick a user and perform different malicious actions without the user’s knowledge. With CSRF attack, a logged-in Joomla superuser could be tricked to visit a link that can remove his/her site’s articles/users, manipulate the database etc. Helix Ultimate has a protection against this.
Rescheduled release timeline
We are receiving lots of feedback and suggestions to make Helix Ultimate much more functional, stable, and accessibility-friendly. All of these would take a bit more time than our previous estimation. We are now considering to take a few more days in testing and furnishing Helix Ultimate. We will release the Helix Ultimate stable version in February 15, 2018.
So, now we are only a single step away from the stable release of Helix Ultimate. Please test this RC version on your experimental sites (e.g. localhost), and share your feedback with us for making further improvements. Happy developing!
System requirements
- Joomla 3.8
- PHP 5.6 or more
- Fresh Joomla installation
Don't use Helix Ultimate RC version in any of your live sites. Install it only with a fresh Joomla instance.
Release timeline
- Release of Alpha version--> January 10, 2018
- Release of Beta version--> January 16, 2018
- Release of RC version--> January 25, 2018
- Release of Stable version--> February 15 2018
Comments (62)