The Manos Blog

 

Joomla 3.0 is here!

September 27, 2012

Joomla 3.0 is now available for download at http://www.joomla.org/download.html! For you early adopters who like to live on the bleeding edge of technology, go get it! Joomla 3.0 represents a huge leap forward for the system in a lot of ways. Congratulations to everyone involved in making this happen! Well done, everyone!

The most noticeable difference is the new administrator template, Isis. The Joomla administrator has never undergone any significant changes since the Mambo days, and Isis represents a big change in the administrator. It was built using Twitter Bootstrap as the underlying framework, and it provides extension developers much-needed UI tools for standardizing extension administrator interfaces. Not only that, but because it uses Bootstrap, the administrator template is the first of any major CMS to be mobile device friendly out-of-the-box.

Bootstrap also extends (optionally) to the front-end, so all extensions can customize their frontend markup with Bootstrap markup. For those that adopt Bootstrap for their projects, this will make it much easier for them to set up and style their sites. For those that don't, it's easy enough not to use it and to use your own custom markup.

Some other great new features in Joomla 3.0 include*:

  • Updated accessible template called Beez3.
  • A simplified 3-step installation process.
  • 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
  • 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
  • Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
  • Unit testing in the CMS
  • Updated system tests in the CMS
  • Custom active menu item for menu module
  • Let the SEF plug-in add the canonical url to the head
  • Version 12.2 of the Joomla Platform

* Source: http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5464-joomla-3-0-0-released.html

Not for everyone

Joomla 3.0 is great, and it's the state of the art in Joomla. But it's not for everyone. If you already have a site running on Joomla 2.5, you don't have to upgrade your site yet. You certainly can and should upgrade if Joomla 3.0 has features that you need, but you don't have to.

If you are building a new site, you have a choice. If you want to stay on the bleeding edge, you can use Joomla 3.0. We are working on a redesign of this site, and we will be using Joomla 3.0. If you're not quite ready to be an early adopter, then Joomla 2.5 is still a great choice for you. We are still using it for our clients as we transition from building with 2.5 to 3.0 in the coming months.

If you want to play around with Joomla 3.0 or use it on an upcoming project, head on over to joomla.org/download.html and download it! I know I already have.

 
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