As announced in December last year, this is the first release of the year for 4AI, and it's focused on making images!
Image generation - and modification - in 4AI
I have been very cautious so far about including image generation into 4AI, as my experiments with available models from OpenAI and others had mixed results, to say the least.
Getting images matching one's description required some kind of magic prompting, numerous experiments, and a fair bit of patience. Sometimes still with average results, and it would probably have been easier to get these images from existing pictures on specialized websites or of our own creation.
In addition, existing models were limited to square images, up to 1024 pixels. While such images are fine for social network use, I feel they are not as suited for display on desktop websites.
With the release of DALL·E 3 last year, it seems to me OpenAI has reached a quality level where generating images as part of 4AI, inside your Joomla website, could become both usable and useful. In addition, DALL·E 3 handles square images as before but also vertical or horizontal images up to 1792 pixels.
And so 4AI 4.0, released today, implements not only image creation but also image modification!
A quick post to keep you updated on what's happening both in and outside of the Joomla World and what's the outlook for 2024 here at Weeblr!
Big 4SEO feature release
We just released 4SEO 5.2.0 (4SEO full changelog is here) and it has several important new or changed things that should make your life both easier and more efficient:
Sitemaps now handled through Google Search Console
4SEO used to ping Google and Bing when a sitemap was ready or updated. Pinging means that we would make a request to a specific URL at Google, telling them "Hey, there's a new/modified sitemap for this website".
It was simple and quick but both Google and Bing have now stopped this service. So I took the opportunity to revamp the sitemap publication process and use 4SEO Search Console connection to directly submit sitemaps to Google.
This happens automatically and transparently each time your sitemap is created or updated. You can also manually submit your sitemap from within 4SEO at any time with a single click.
Today's one of these great days, where the Joomla community can regroup around a major new release of our preferred CMS: Joomla 5 has just landed minutes ago and is available for all to upgrade to.
What's in it?
No need to re-hash the Joomla.org announcement, you can read all the details there. Joomla 5 has a lot of internal, technical changes and improvements as well as new features. Let's mention:
Admin template dark mode
Some Structured data generation
Performance improvements
AVIF file format support (for more efficient images)
A super quick post, again about our subscriptions. A month ago, I announced that all our extension subscriptions would come in two flavors: updates and support for either 3 or 200 websites.
- The regular plans including 3 websites are geared towards individuals who usually run one website. The plan includes 3 sites to account for test versions you may be running on a subdomain or on your computer, so that you don't have to worry about that
- The PRO plans include(d) up to 200 sites, and are of course for agencies and independent developers who operate a large number of websites on behalf of their clients
Turns out these 200 websites plans has caused some confusion with some users, so in the sake of clarification and effective immediately, all PRO plans are valid for an unlimited number of websites.
This has been reflected on the website, and if you purchased already a PRO plan, when it was showing a 200 sites limit, this of course applies to you as well and your subscription is valid for an unlimited number of sites.
What I like discussing about in these blog posts and podcast episodes is technology, new features, and new products. But sometimes other, less fun topics must be addressed, and today I have not one but two such topics.
We'll have a new version of 4AI released later this week, now that GPT4 is available for all at last, but for now let's deal with price changes and the discontinuation of sh404SEF.
How to increase prices without increasing prices?
The elephant in the room: most of the world has been taken into a spiral of inflation and cost increases over the last couple of years. I am no exception, and it's been a struggle to try and keep our prices as they were during that time.
