This is just a quick update to let anyone out there who is using DOCman List on a site with a few thousand documents that are all going to be displayed on a single page I've got some great updates coming around the corner for you!
One of them is currently already available from the Downloads section: an Updated Joomla! Core SEF System Plugin (you can simply download and install it and it will overwrite the default Joomla! SEF System Plugin).
This plugin was created in order to solve a problem I've detailed here. The problem is a PHP "White Screen of Death" which I originally thought was due to a problem in DOCman List somewhere, but after some debugging I discovered it was due to a call to the preg_replace function failing within the Joomla! SEF System Plugin that was causing the entire page's output to be replaced by an empty string. My updated version I have here on this site fixes that issue by introducing a workaround that checks to see if the regular expressions fails and tries again (and if that doesn't work, it just continues with the existing page output, and prevents the empty string problem from occurring).
The other BIG improvement with the upcoming 1.5.5 version of DOCman List is an entirely reworked data retrieval system that performs "preloading" of the document and category information in order to prevent the need to run many queries.
This evening I emailed the Joomlatools team (the DOCman developers) to see if they can help accommodate me with a small addition to the DOCman Router that would allow me to keep the number of queries down when SEF URLs are turned on (currently the Router causes a query to be executed for every unique document even if DOCman List already loaded the data for the document...effectively negating the improvements).
I'm hoping they'll be receptive of the idea, as it will make things much easier for me, but if not, I'll have to figure out another way to keep things efficient with SEF URLs turned on.
Look for the new DOCman List release on October 17th!
