Joomla 3.5 and JoomShaper Products
Yesterday the Joomla! Project and the Production Leadership Team introduced a stable version of Joomla! 3.5. It comes with over 30 new features, including support for the recently released PHP 7 scripting language, which significantly increases web site speed.
Helix3 Joomla 3.5
We are happy to announce that SP Page Builder (PRO) and new templates based on Helix3 are fully compatibility with new version of Joomla 3.5. No issues has been discovered so far, we tested our solutions on several browsers. But please be sure that you have stable version of J3.5 installed and no files from beta or RC left on server. Yes, we also tested with latest PHP 7.
How new features may help your business grown
Last coupe of years PHP has been criticized for performance-related issues, but it has been changed lastly with PHP 7. For the last few months, J3.5 Core has been getting ready for the upcoming release of PHP7. Now if have possibility to switch to PHP 7 you can do it - thanks to the new Zend Engine 3.0, your Joomla website see up to 2x faster performance and 50% better memory consumption than PHP 5.6. This major improvement in speed allows web developers to create sites that provide interesting and engaging interactive features that still respond to user input as quickly as modern web users have come to expect. Please note! That Joomla! 3.4.5 does not support PHP 7 but core of Joomla! 3.5 does. Although upgrading your site from PHP 5.x to PHP 7 involves carefully checking for incompatibilities of used 3rd party extenstions. The latest version of PHP may break your site. But why? Some of older components, plugins, modules may have old code that will not work on the latest version of PHP or Joomla itself. A number of deprecated functionalities and dead or unsupported Server APIs have been eliminated from the version 7. Some of the items that are removed from PHP 7 are PHP4 style constructors, ASP style tags, ereg and MySQL extensions etc. This is why we advise that you always test on a staging environment before you enable it on your live site. The benefits of upgrading to PHP 7 make the effort very worthwhil.
In addition to the features mentioned above, other highlights of the 3.5 release include:
- Drag and Drop Images: Adding an image is now as easy as dragging and dropping it from your computer directly into the content. This works anywhere that you are using the default TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor.
- Editor Buttons added to the Toolbar: You no longer need to scroll down the page to find the “readmore” or “insert image” buttons. Editor extension buttons that used to be placed below the text area can now be found in the toolbar where they belong.
- Easily Insert Modules in Articles: allows users to easily add a module into an article with a button directly on the editor toolbar. Users don’t need to learn any syntax or remember the module details as the user interface does it for them.
In general it means that you do not have to install JCE or other editor each time. Those features are already now, built-in. - Article counts: a set of updates that allows the visual presentation of published, unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds.
- Added site and admin links to module user: adds switches to the mod_status module to show/hide links to the front-end and back-end of the site.
- Random category blog and list order: this update answers a common user request to add a random ordering option for articles in the blog category and category list view.
You can download Joomla 3.5 - right now
- New Installations: Download Joomla! 3.5.0 (Full package) »
- Update Package: Download Joomla! 3.5.0 (Update package) »
Note: Please read the general update instructions before updating or the specific 3.4 to 3.5 update instructions. Please remember to backup your site before and clear your browser's cache after upgrading.
