A minimal of non-backwards compatible changes were made going from version 8 to 9. This includes drag-n-drop image uploading, migration to SVG emoticons, and other features.
Due to the big changes in the structure of this udpate, if you have created a Template Override for the shoutbox, you will need to remove it and re-apply it. Failure to do so, will result in Javascript errors and shout submissions not working. As the Javvascript has been completely re-written, you will also be required to clear your Joomla cache, if it's enabled.
A minimal of non-backwards compatible changes were made going from version 7 to 8. This includes features User Tagging (still in Beta).
Due to the big changes in the structure of this update, if you have created a Template Override for the shoutbox, you will need to remove it and re-apply it. Failure to do so, will result in Javascript errors and shout submissions not working.
A minimal of non-backwards compatible changes were made going from version 6 to 7. This includes features such as editing your own shout and more styling options.
Due to the big changes in the structure of this udpate, if you have created a Template Override for the shoutbox, you will need to remove it and re-apply it. Failure to do so, will result in Javascript errors and shout submissions not working.
A minimal of non-backwards compatible changes were made going from version 5 to 6. This includes features such as the history/archive, ReCaptcha v2, BBCode updates and Bootstrap 3 integration.
A minimal of non-backwards compatible changes were made going from version 4 to 5. The main one being the use of JLayouts for the rendering of the shouts. This has allowed us to add more features such as the ability for users to delete their own shouts.
With the introduction of AJAX posts into shoutbox 3.x the way that posts were rendered needed to change. Posts are now rendered using the default_message file. Note this is NOT quite the same as a regular Joomla subtemplate. In here you can render special things by including them in curely bracers (e.g. {USER}). The special things are:
Note in the file itself the shout being rendered is also available as $shout if you want to do more than just what the parameters allow.
$shout
The AJAX mechanics involved utilizing com_ajax that was introduced in Joomla 3.2 (for more information see the Joomla! Docs at https://docs.joomla.org/Using_Joomla_Ajax_Interface). If you are using a Joomla version between 3.0 and 3.2 then you MUST upgrade to at least Joomla! 3.2.7 to use version 3.x of the shoutbox.
If you are using Joomla 2.5 then at present you cannot use AJAX. George (of JoomJunk) and Matt Thomas (ex Joomla Platform Leadership Team and the person who wrote com_ajax) are working on a backported version for Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 at https://github.com/Joomla-Ajax-Interface/component however the data returned in this component is not compatible with that returned from Joomla 3.x. So for now having the shoutbox support both Joomla! versions is impossible. In the future we hope to finalise this backported extension so using AJAX will be possible.
We also changed some of the parameters values which had on and off switches to standardize them as "off" corresponding to a value of 0 and "on" corresponding to a value of 1. You may need to update your template overrides accordingly.
If you are using a MYSQL database table note that we updated the storage engine to InnoDB in line with Joomla 3. This shouldn't break any existing Joomla 2.5 installs - but is a different engine to that used by core there. This is in line with Joomla 2.5 support being dropped by Joomla.
A minimal of non-backwards compatible changes were made going from version 1 to 2. The most important was the fields names were changed to add a jjshout prefix. This solved various integration issues when the shoutbox was placed with other modules or components which shared the same field names.
If you had a template override in place you will also need to add the necessary code for the rendering of the bbcode buttons (note that if turned on then the bbcode will still render if the shortcodes are written manually)