We have just reached an important milestone. The release of JomSocial 2.6 Beta 2 signals the completion of all planned features and improvements for the upcoming JomSocial 2.6.

What are the major features in JomSocial 2.6? Glad that you ask. Most updates in JomSocial 2.6 revolve around 4 primary features. 

Those are:

• Featured area improvements to assist content discovery among community members
• The much requested internal notifications to let users updated with their participated activities. Users may opt in or out of each single notification and email update.
• Recurring events to allow daily, weekly and month recurrence with iCal import. Plus, extensive update in avatar management for to handle recurring series. The calendar function sees a much improved usability to better highlight event start date, the span of event and support for recurring event.
• Group file upload functionality with intelligent file listing and protection against direct linking. It is a modular implementation to support future updates in other areas of JomSocial.

Apart from major features above, we have also implemented numerous updates across the board. We have consolidated Edit Profile & Edit Details area into one, and at the same time, merged Preference, Privacy Notifications & Blocked List into one centralized area. 

Photo tagging, messaging & event invite feature has also been improved for a much faster performance which should cope with thousands of friends. Yes, we do have users on large JomSocial sites that have thousands of friends. In JomSocial 2.4, we found out that the photo gallery scroller does not behave as well as we hope it should be. As such, we have updated it to use a much improved scroller for better usability and consistency with new features of JomSocial 2.6. And oh, for sites with thousands of photos in a single album, an option to disable the scroller has been added in our configuration. 

I hope that is sufficient for now. A complete list of features, enhancements and bugfixes will be made available once JomSocial RC is released.

What are you waiting for? Grab the latest JomSocial 2.6 Beta 2 package now!

Note: If you have previously installed any Beta/Alpha version, and encountered a 500 error, it is most likely that a table was not updated.

Using PHPMyAdmin, please run this query after installation of Beta 2:
ALTER TABLE `jos_community_files` ADD `type` VARCHAR( 255 )

We have also received reports that some users were not able to download the file. Please ensure that you have logged into the development site and have joined the JomSocial 2.6 Beta 2 group. If you are still unable to download, please clean up your browser's cache. Should the problem persists, please let us know the browser version and OS that you are currently using.

On a side note, do you use any template override with JomSocial? We are furiously updating popular templates from Rockettheme, Joomlart, Gavick and Yootheme for JomSocial 2.6 compatibility. If you have any of the above template, and notice compatibility issues (styling/broken features/javascript errors/out-of-place items), please let us know at the Development site.