We want to end our summer vacations with the release of RAXO All-mode K2 module that many of you have been asking about. You have already seen how fast thumbnails work and how cool they look in the latest version of our PRO module. Now you want the same changes to your RAXO news module for K2. So here you are.

New features:

• Higher quality and light sharpening for thumbnails;
• Thumbnails now get loaded directly from the cache with static URLs and your site gets 10 times increase in thumbnail loading speed.

Improved:

• Thumbnail cache lifetime is increased to 6 months, made both on server and client sides;
• Start using class autoloader (JLoader) to save memory and performance;
• Fixed "A non-numeric value" warning on PHP 7.1;
• Fix for error message when category source is wrong;
• Fixed blurred images in Default layout;
• Fixed interface issue appearing in Joomla 3.7.3;
• Small code adjustments to make it more performant.

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.

The results are astonishing - no jpeg artefacts, just sharp and crisp images. Well, one look is worth a thousand words. See for yourself.

Faster loading for thumbnails

There was one more condition added 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_allmode_k2/tools/tb.php?src=/media/k2/items/src/f8a458e18503c86603dc02339a944feb.jpg&w=240&h=160&zc=1"

Now a thumbnail path leads to the image directly:

"/images/raxo_thumbs/amk/tb-w240-h160-crop-int-95ef5a1a36ff1296a9c0a9870f16ed58.jpg"

How does your K2 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.