Thursday September 27th, Joomla! has announced the release for Joomla! 3.0 the next major release of their popular content management system (CMS). With this release it contains major steps forward with improved frontend and backend user interfaces, simplified and flexible installation, and fine tuned core components.
One of the most important updates to this release is the user interface (UI) updates. In previous versions of Joomla! (1.0, 1.5, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5) the look and feel of Joomla! stayed pretty consistent. With this new release a completely brand new UI has been developed to improve your daily job of managing Joomla! content and components.
But that isn’t everything that that has been enhanced with Joomla! 3.0. Check out the list below to see some more features:
What are the new features of Joomla! 3?
- Now ships with the popular Twitter Bootstrap framework. You will start to see third party developers starting to use bootstrap more. Making things unified for the end user
- A new responsive, mobile device friendly administrator template–Isis– and interface.
- A new front end template, Protostar, which is built using Twitter Bootstrap. This is also responsive.
- Updated accessible template called Beez3.
- A simplified 3-step installation process. Now Joomla! is making installation faster and easier. Thank you!
- PostgreSQL Driver. You will be able to run Joomla 3.0 sites using the PostgreSQL database.
- PHP Memcached Driver
- Use of JFeed for feed management rather than SimplePie
- Installation of language packages directly from the extension manager
- Guest user group present by default
- Saving blank articles allowed. As a development company we have been looking for this feature for some time. Many times we have ran into situations where this feature is needed.
- New administrator statistics module
- Update TinyMCE to version 3.5.6.
- Continued clean up of older unused code, files and database fields and tables and improved standardization of tables.
- Improvements to Smart Search for the CMS
- Extensive work on code style standardization and consistency
- Unit testing in the CMS
- Updated system tests in the CMS
- Custom active menu item for menu module
- SEF plug-in handles canonical URLs. This is huge for SEO. Matt Cutts has a great post here about the structure behind Canonical urls
- Version 12.2 of the Joomla Platform
So a new version has hit the market for Joomla. What do you think of the latest CMS?
Contact ‘corePHP’ for questions about how Joomla! 3.0 will best suit your needs. Feel free to contact us to discuss your strategy of staying current for Joomla. You can also visit Joomla.org to learn more directly and download.
Best,
Michael Pignataro
