Joomla 3.5 has been Released

It’s that time again; The Joomla development team have released the next major version of their CMS, Joomla 3.5. This release fixes a bunch of security issues, adds plenty of new functionality. For those of you with existing Joomla websites you will be glad to hear that this time the development team have provided a simple upgrade process from 2.5. So one will not run into the migration problems faced when Joomla 2.5 was released. It is so much easier to upgrade to 3.5 than it was to 2.5.

Wondering if you should upgrade? Here is a list of the major updates to the CMS (over 2.5):

• PHP 7 Support – on a properly configured server your website should be quite a bit faster.
• Built in updater notifications – have your website email you when a new update has been released.
• System information export – get better support by exporting your main server configuration to a text file.
• Drag and Drop out of the box – Finally! One can now drag and drop images into the editor, without having to rely on external extensions, like JCE. The fewer third party extensions that your website uses, the better from a performance and security perspective.
• Modules in articles – there is no need to use a plugin code to insert a module position into content any longer. Insert them into the content using the editor.
• New Editor Buttons – the Read More and Insert Image buttons are now in the toolbar rather than at the bottom of the editor. This has been one of my complaints about the editor since Joomla 1.5, many years ago.
• Improved Category Manager which now shows the article counts for each category broken down into Published, Unpublished and Trashed. This makes it far easier to manage one’s content structure.
• Weblinks removed – This little used feature has been pulled out into a separate JED extension. In all these years I have not used the weblinks feature, not even once on scores of websites.
• Improved Media Manager, with a redesigned user interface.
• Redesigned User Interface to ease website usage on mobile and tablet.
• Two Factor Authentication out of the box. Add another layer of security to your website by implementing two-factor authentication.
• Send test email – This feature allows you to test your email settings straight from the Global Configuration section of the administrator panel. A time-saving feature.

As of March 2016 support for Joomla 3.4 ends. Joomla 3.5 will is now the currently supported stable strain of the CMS. It is advised that one update to this version and keep it maintained + upgrade when the next new version is released. The Joomla team have done away with the previous Long Term Support (LTS) strategy, where each x.5 release had at least two years of support. Instead they have moved to a method of continuous releases. Those of you who run WordPress websites will be glad to hear this. This process is so much more simpler than in previous versions. This also means that there should be far less chance of breakage on updates as each upgrade will only change a subset of the system’s functionality.

I hope this article was helpful to you. If you have any questions feel free to make a note in the comments below.

Happy upgrading. Hope you enjoy Joomla 3.5 .