We are happy to announce the next versions of RAXO Related Articles and RAXO Related K2 Items modules. You get some new cool features - ordering by most relevant items, better looking and much faster loading thumbnails. See the details inside.
UPDATE: RAXO Related Articles - version 1.6
UPDATE: RAXO Related K2 Items - version 1.4
New features:
- New ordering option: Most relevant first;
- Thumbnails now get loaded directly from the cache with static URLs and your site gets 10 times increase in thumbnail loading speed.
Improved:
- Higher quality and light sharpening for thumbnails;
- Thumbnail cache lifetime is increased to 6 month, made both on server and client side;
- Start using class autoloader (JLoader) to save memory and performance;
- Fix PHP 7.1 "A non-numeric value" warning.
Related articles listed by relevance
Showing users related articles has proven to be an effective way of getting more pageviews. Moreover, when a user stays longer on your site it's a signal for search engines to move your site higher in rank.
But do you know what is biggest complaint readers have about related content? The lack of relevance. The new module feature - ordering by most relevant articles - addresses this concern. How it works. When you select this option, the module calculates the number of tag or keyword matches between the current entry and other articles. The articles that have more matches go first in the module output. We believe this feature will help you to provide appropriate suggestions for your Joomla articles more accurately.
One important note for owners of big sites. We recommend to use tags to display related articles in the module. If you use keywords, the sorting option "Most relevant first" might be resource intensive for Joomla sites that contain 10,000+ articles.
Faster loading for thumbnails
We added one more condition to thumbnail creation function. If a thumbnail exists already, the module shows it right away from the cache folder, without calling the thumbnail library.
In the previous module version a path to a thumbnails had this src, where tb.php is a thumbnail library:
"/modules/mod_raxo_related_articles/tools/tb.php?src=..%2Fimages%2Fimage.jpg&w=240&h=160&zc=1"
Now a thumbnail path leads to the image directly:
"/images/raxo_thumbs/tb-w240-h160-crop-int-95ef5a1a36ff1296a9c0a9870f16ed58-img.jpg"
How does your Joomla site benefit from this?
- More than 10 times increase in thumbnail loading speed.
Especially if you have lots of thumbnails (>200) on one page. - Substantial reduction in server load.
This could be crucial for sites located on inexpensive shared Joomla hostings. - This helps to improve your website's overall performance.
Better Quality Thumbnails
It common knowledge, when images are rescaled, especially small thumbnail images, they look rather blurred compared to the original. Which is why we decided to add a light sharpening effect to improve the image quality when creating thumbnails in the module. Also, we increased jpeg quality to 95% to get very clean and crisp thumbnail images without visible jpeg distortions.
