This month was very busy with development. My goal for JoomlaPack 2.4 was more than just fix outstanding bugs; my goal was to make JoomlaPack usable in more server environments and give you more power. This post describes what JoomlaPack's very own Santa Claus has in its bags for December 2009 
Last time I was talking about the problems many servers had with 403 Forbidden error messages. The short version of the story is that those servers had some anti-DoS countermeasures installed. Nothing really fancy, it's usually a server module which throws a 403 Forbidden error whenever you try to access server resources faster than a preset threshold. This usually means that if you try to load two pages in one second, you get the venerable error. JoomlaPack has a lot of activiry going on and if you're on a fast server you can't imagine how easy it is to try loading more than one page per second. To this end, I have added a "Minimum execution time" parameter in both JoomlaPack and Kickstart. This allows them to work around this problem by adding a small delay between page loads only if it's necessary. This last part is what makes the solution worth it.
Another issue most of you are unaware of is that your backup files download can be corrupt if you use the Download button or the download link in the "Administer Backup Files" page. The reason is rather simple. JoomlaPack has to "channel" the backup file through PHP to your browser, as the backup file is normally inaccessible directly from the web. The drawback is that if your backup file is large and/or your connection is slow, you end up with a partial download. Or, your old, non standards compliant browser (IE6, please die) decides to corrupt a binary download. Anyway, you should really use FTP to download your backup files, that's why JoomlaPack 2.4 will warn you before downloading. Scare tactics it may seem, but I have to protect the innocent.
On popular request, JPI4 now supports editing the live_site Joomla! configuration parameter. It seems that some servers can't work without it, so the only responsible thing to do was to support it.
I saved the biggest news for the dedicated readers, who read through the entire post.
For starters, JoomlaPack 2.4 will have an optional, unselected by default, new database backup engine which supports normal tables with and without foreign keys (with table dependency tracking!), memory tables, federated tables, merge tables, views, stored procedures, stored functions and triggers. Phew! That's pretty much the entire MySQL 5 feature set. As far as I know, even MySQL Administrator doesn't support all of them - most notaby merge tables. You can use it by selecting the "MySQL 5 optimized dump engine" as the "Dump engine" in JoomlaPack's Advanced Configuration pane. One word of caution though. Backing all of those up is possible anyway, but restoring them requires using JPI4. JPI2 only supports tables and JPI3 only supports tables and views, wheras JPI4 supports the whole lot.
Finally, there will be a new addition to our JoomlaPack Native Tools stack: JoomlaPack SiteDiff. It is a security tool which allows you to rapidly compare two site backups and report which files were modified (based on secure MD5 sums), added, deleted or left unchanged. The rationale is that you can easily spot if something is going wrong, e.g. a botnet installing a backdoor script or a cracker having uploaded a site hacking tool. You can read more about what it does and how it works on my personal site.
All of these tools are available today, as a developer's preview release. You can grab them from the Bleeding Edge. If you run into any new or recurring bugs, don't think twice; post in the SVN section of our support forum. I will gladly sort them out!