Update your own plugins

Instructions for updating your own plugins

Caution: All Visforms and Visforms Subscription plugins have been revised. If you have developed your own individual Visforms plugins for your website, these must also be adapted.

When updating to Visforms 5.0.0 and Subscription 5.0.0 for Joomla instances with individually developed plugins for Visforms, important adjustments must be taken into account.
Individual plugins are plugins that you have developed yourself or that you have been commissioned to develop.

New technical standards and frameworks in Joomla

Joomla is continually adapting to new technical standards and frameworks. Even though Joomla 4 and Joomla 5 look very similar on the outside, the code differs significantly in some places. In addition to restructuring the file structure, these points include the complete overhaul of the Joomla event handling mechanism. This requires adjustments in all Joomla extensions.

Adjustment of Visforms during the transition from Joomla 4 to Joomla 5

We decided to use the transition from Visforms for Joomla 4 to Visforms for Joomla 5 for these code restructurings. This allows us and you to simultaneously switch from the old to the new event handler mechanism in one step.

The event producer

On the event generation side, we changed the Visforms code that triggers the Visforms events. Instead of arrays that contain a number of known parameters in a fixed order, individual event objects are now passed.

The event receiver

You now also have to take action on the event recipient side. The following is absolutely necessary in all of your individual plugins:

  • Adjust the signature of the event handlers.
  • Add additional code to register for the new events.

All plugins that are installed through Visforms or the Visforms Subscription have been revised accordingly.
If individual Visforms plugins have been developed for your website, these must also be adapted.
More about this in: Instructions for correcting the code of your own plugins.