RocketTheme Blog

Many of our customers may have noticed a new update (1.1.9) has been made available for RokBooster this week. This is a fairly significant update as it adds several new features intended to make its use and application easier for site administration while adding flexibility.

In this article, we’ll examine three major feature additions that have been added to RokBooster for Joomla 2.5 and 3.x users.

All of these new features can be toggled in the Advanced Settings tab found by navigating to Administrator -> Extensions -> Plug-in Manager -> System - RokBooster in the backend of your site. Make sure RokBooster is activated as it isn’t turned on by default.

Flexible JS Ignore System

RokBooster combines and compresses JavaScript elements in order to reduce the amount of work required for both the server and client when opening a page. There are times, however, that you might wish to have a JS file ignored by RokBooster to let it run as it exists.

JS extensions that are made for the backend of a site, such as a text editor, aren’t necessarily something you need to optimize. Caching really doesn’t help improve site function on this end, so ignoring this JS file allows RokBooster to overlook it.

Setting up the JS ignore feature is really quite easy. Just navigate to Administrator -> Extensions -> Plug-in Manager -> System - RokBooster and select the Advanced Options tab.

From here, you’ll see a box titled Ignore Files. This box allows you to tag your JS file(s) to ignore in three different ways.

First, you can enter the full path and filename of the JS file you wish to have RokBooster ignore. This is the method that has existed all along and is still available to you in order to preserve existing ignore options you’ve placed on previous RokBooster versions.

The next method only requires the directory name the file is in. Let’s say you have an extension with multiple JS files you want to have ignored by RokBooster. Instead of listing them individually, you can list just the folder name. If, for example, you want to have RokBooster ignore every JS file in the /jscripts directory, just type jscripts in the box.

Additionally, you might know the name of the JS file you want to ignore, but not its exact location in your directory structure. No problem, you need but to input the name of the JS file in its entirety. Typing jscript_1.js will tell RokBooster to ignore any JS file named jscript_1.js.

Page Ignore System

The Page Ignore field, also found on the Advanced Options tab from Administrator -> Extensions -> Plug-in Manager -> System - RokBooster, allows you to tell RokBooster to ignore specific pages on your site by path, URL, or partial URL.

Let’s say you have a page on your site that has scripts running on it that don’t respond well to RokBooster. You can isolate that page and have it ignored by entering one of three different pieces of information.

You can enter the URL of that page (http://(your URL).com/blog/blogpost.php), a path (/blog/) to let RokBooster know to ignore everything in the /blog/ path, or a partial URL (http://(your URL).com/blog/).

If you use double quotes ("") around a string, it will match exactly. If you don't use the quotes, it will match any part of the page to the current URL. Exact matches with double quotes should start with a forward slash (/). If you use just a forward slash and nothing else, it will match the homepage only.

Less than IE v10 Filtering

Rather than disable RokBooster for all IE users, you can elect just to disable it for the ones running an older version of IE that may not play well with these compression methods. By selecting the new Less than IE v10 Only option for Disable for Internet Explorer you’re able to use RokBooster to speed up site performance for a greater number of users without having to worry about the few still using old, outdated versions of IE running into any problems.

These three new features are intended to make life easier for the site administrator. A lot of this update was directly influenced by feedback we received from our community, and we’d like to thank you for your continued support and feedback as we continue to make RocketTheme the best source for templates and extensions out there.

Photo: Rusty Clark