Some progress updates on Komento 3

Phew, 2016 has been a roller coaster year for most of us! With the recent release of EasySocial 2.0 and many other apps, the team have also been working on Komento 3.0 and EasyBlog 5.1! 

It has been almost 3 years now since the first release of Komento 1.0. It was available to download for free until we posted the announcement here. While some of you don't agree with our move, we needed to take this step to move ahead.

Komento has always been an ideal extension for adding comments on your Joomla! site. In fact, it is one of the best commenting solutions for Joomla with a super awesome UI! We have taken another huge leap again with Komento 3.0. This time by refactoring the code base and also trimming down tons of fats from the extension. Read to learn more about what to expect for Komento 3.0

Our priority for Komento 3 was to ensure that the code base are updated to have a very similar code base to the rest of our extensions and of course to boost the performance of the extension. That's not just it, we have also revamped and restructured the entire comments layout to give it a more modern touch and also improved on the user experience too.

Massive Performance Improvements

In terms of our javascript files, Komento 3.0 is on an insane diet with almost 200kb of fats (300kb if jQuery is decoupled) being stripped off from Komento 2.0. It no longer requires Foundry just like the rest of our extensions.

On a site with jQuery decoupled and gzip compressions, Komento 3.0 script files are only 90kb! How cool is that! Just by installing Komento 3.0, you will immediately feel the speed punch! For the guys that worry about performance, this is definitely going to be one of the best feature in Komento 3.0.

On top of all the client side optimizations, we have also performed tons of performance improvements on the database and php scripts as well. Overall, these improvements are staggering!

Web Push Notifications

Komento 3.0 will be able to integrate with OneSignal out of the box. If you have not heard about them yet, OneSignal provides a free web push service for your web sites. It delivers real time notifications directly to the user's browser even if they don't open your site. Your visitors would get instant notification whenever a new comment is made on the site.

More Anti-spam Delights 

For many years now, we have been getting hit hard with spammers and we have been getting really tired with this. Therefore we have now optimized the anti spam tools which are included with Komento 3.0. These new improvement allows you to train Akismet for spams and also false positive reports. By introducing a new "Spam list" filter at the back end allows you to sift through probable spam comments easily and gives you better control over spams.

Apart from that, we have also been scouting for 3rd party anti spam tools and found Cleantalk. Cleantalk provides a similar anti spam service that is similar to Akismet but it provides greater spam detection when compared to Akismet.

I am pretty sure that with Komento 3.0, your site would be almost 99% spam free if integrated with these awesome and cool anti spam services.

Less Is More 

Throughout these years, we have learnt that to offer more is to offer less. One of the biggest hurdle in all our extensions was the sea of settings and configuration. This is the same for versions prior to Komento 2.x. It had a massive amount of settings and also integration settings as well. All of these are unnecessary and does more harm than good.

With Komento 3.0, we have merged these settings into a single settings page and we have also removed over 100 different settings that we felt was unnecessary clutter in the extension. Komento 3.0 will work on the site out of the box with close to zero configuration.

The look-and-feel of the administration interface is now much more aligned and unified to the rest of our extensions. If you own any of our extensions, they will look very identical and the learning curve is much more minimal now. The overall administration of Komento 3.0 also contains more admin goodies including e-mail editors, theme file editors which allows you to easily customize these files.

Redesigned Themes & Restructured Theme files

One of the biggest issue with Komento, is that it contains too many smaller theme files which makes customisation extremely painful as you need to override tons of files. With Komento 3.0, we have also trimmed the theme files and a lot of unnecessary and redundant HTML codes are also removed. 

On the themes department, we have re-designed most of the existing themes in Komento and it will be rebranded as the following:

• Wireframe (Will retain it's name just like the rest of our extensions)
• Dark (Will retain it's name just like the rest of our extensions)
• Outline (Known previously as kuro)
• Vortex (Known previously as minimo)
• Elegant (Known previously as freso)
• Bubbles (Known previously as bubbo)

Editor Changes

In Komento 3.0, we have now updated the emoticons to use a sprite instead of loading separate images. This is to ensure that the page loads up much faster as opposed to loading these images separately. There is also a new button which allows you to embed Gist code blocks.

The internal syntax highlighter is also replaced with Prism.js which is an awesome syntax highlighting tool.

When Can I Download Komento 3.0?

We are polishing up some of the remaining teething issues and you should expect for an alpha release pretty soon! We are hoping to push out Komento 3.0 stable before Christmas so that most of you could enjoy your holidays while these awesome anti spam services protects your site from any incoming spammers.