Joomla 3.5 Beta1 - what near future will bring
Two days ago Joomla 3.5 Beta1 has been realised. Joomla! 3 is the latest major release of the Joomla! CMS, with 3.5 the sixth standard-term support release in this series.
What’s new in Joomla 3.5
The big unknown is, what is new in Joomla 3.5? We can expect the following possible features:
Joomla Update emails plugin
Thanks to Nicholas Dionysopoulos (from Akeeba), Joomla will get a plugin which periodically checks for updated Joomla! versions and, when one is found, emails the Super Users of the site to remind them. In my option we all should get a core tool which would be similar Akeeba CMS Update, I hope in future we will but not now yet.
Plugin to gather basic anonymized data as an opt-out
Since Joomla 3.5 Joomla contains an anonymous statistics tracking plugin that provides your Joomla version, PHP version, database engine and version, and server operating system. This data is collected in order to ensure that as we develop new versions of Joomla we provide the most optimal software taking advantage of the latest database and PHP features but without loosing significant numbers of users. But do not worry in any time you can disable the plugin called System - Joomla! Statistics.
Count items
This feature adds the number of published, unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for the articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds.
What is funny or maybe not, in Joomla 1.5 the Category Manager showed the number of published, unpublished and trashed articles per category. Back to future?
Added site and admin links to Module User Status
Adds switches to the mod_status admin module to show/hide links to the front-end and back-end of the site.
Ability to add a user CSS file to Protostar
Adds a check to see if the file custom.css exists and loads the file to allow user customization. Great solution, but who is still using Protostar template longer than a week, where there are so many beautiful and more useful templates around ;) BTW Did you know that you could use custom.css also for Isis administrator template in Joomla 3.4.
TinyMCE drag and drop images
Adds the ability to drag and drop images into the tinyMCE editor (text area) that comes by default with Joomla 3. Also editor tool bar got a new, modernized skin (theme) with improved touch support.
For me more interesting and important change was a option (button) to insert modules and links to other articles inside article content. Thanks a lot, Joomla Team :)
The stable release - when?
Joomla team have revised the launch timeline slightly to ensure that they can get everything up to the quality levels we all would like, and to ensure thorough testing on as many hosting environments as possible. The schedule is now as follows:
- 17 November - Joomla 3.5 beta 2
- 1 December - Joomla 3.5 RC (Release Candidate)
- 8 December – Joomla 3.5 Stable
About Joomla 3.5 stable and PHP 7, probably compatibility without any problems.