Assign weights to InstantReply results. In the past all InstantReply sources carried the same weight when being considered for inclusion in the displayed top ten results. Because long text,like DocImport articles have a more accurate and higher marked classification than short form text like ticket titles this could skew the results towards a specific kind of content that's not representative of what is most relevant for your users. In this version each InstantReply plugin can be assigned a different "weight" which can be used to shift the results bias towards a more reasonable direction. These weights can be very site-specific which is why they are defined by you and no longer hardcoded.
Replace zero datetime with nullable datetime (gh-251). For historical reasons our software was following the Joomla convention of using the fake date “0000-00-00 00:00:00” as a placeholder meaning “no date”. MySQL 5.7 and later will, by default, not allow zeroes in the month or day part of the day unless explicitly told otherwise. While Joomla does explicitly tell MySQL to allow zeroes in dates, even in Joomla 4, this behavior is deprecated and might be removed in a future version of Joomla. We have now replaced these placeholder dates with a NULL value – a special value which MySQL and PHP understand to mean “a date has not been set yet”. All your database tables will be automatically converted upon upgrading our software or, if that fails, when you visit the Control Panel (main component) page. This means that the upgrade or first access to the Control Panel page may appear to take a bit longer than usual. That's normal and there's no reason to be alarmed. If you get a white page wait a minute and retry. On extremely big sites on very slow servers you may have to repeat that a few times. On the vast majority of sites you won't need to do that at all.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
We only officially support using our software with the latest Joomla! release branch, 3.9. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of Joomla! for security reasons. Older versions of Joomla! have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites.
We offer limited support for Joomla 4.0 which is currently in Beta. Akeeba Ticket System will work on it but there may be some minor or bigger issues. We try to discover and address them. The biggest challenge is that Joomla 4 is still undergoing changes, despite being labeled Beta, which may introduce new issues on each release. We do not plan on offering full support for Joomla 4 until it reaches at least the Release Candidate 1 stage.
Support for Joomla 3.10 is currently considered experimental. At the time of this writing Joomla 3.10 is in a pre-production, alpha state. We strongly advise you to NOT use Joomla 3.10. Like all new Joomla 3 version families we plan on supporting it as soon as it reaches stable status.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security reasons. Older versions of PHP have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites and they have stopped receiving security updates, leaving you exposed to these issues.
At the time of this writing we have extensively tested our software with PHP 8 on both Joomla 3 and 4. However, PHP 8 is sill in a pre-release state and not officially supported by Joomla. As a result we consider PHP 8 support tentative. We expect to be able to officially support PHP 8 around 2-4 weeks after Joomla implements full PHP 8 compatibility. PHP 8 itself is scheduled for release on November 26th. Our prediction for full PHP 8 support is before the end of January 2021, as long as Joomla adds support for it by end December 2020.
Please note that earlier PHP versions including but not limited to PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0 are no longer supported and our software no longer works on them.