Hello Joomla community. It was a great weekend. We’ve attended the JandBeyond last week, and our Helix framework won the J.O.S.C.A.R award as the best template system. It’s a big achievement that inspired us hugely. Another trending news of the week is, the plan for Joomla 3.8 release has been announced. Let’s see the new features of Joomla 3.8.
Mainly, there are two new features announced for Joomla 3.8 so far- new URL router, and Joomla 4 compatibility layer. Additional features may also be included before the feature freeze on July 14.
New URL Router
A modern URL routing system in Joomla was initially scheduled for the v3.7 release. However, the plan for including the new router was later cancelled for Joomla 3.7, and scheduled for Joomla 3.8. The new routing system will offer more human-friendly URLs and page/archive addresses. It will also improve your site's SEO performance. With this feature, you will be able to control whether content item IDs would appear in URLs. If you wish, you can completely remove these IDs from your site URLs. The Joomla development team has shared some detailed examples regarding the upcoming routing system in Joomla 3.8.
Here are the changes you can have using the new router in Joomla 3.8.
Category Page Example
- Existing router: /article-categories/72-bakery-dairy/photo-gallery/products
- New router with IDs: /article-categories/26-bakery-dairy/28-photo-gallery/72-products
- New router without IDs: /article-categories/bakery-dairy/photo-gallery/products
Article Page Example
- Existing router: /article-categories/72-bakery-dairy/photo-gallery/products/25-cakes
- New router with IDs: /article-categories/26-bakery-dairy/28-photo-gallery/72-products/25-cakes
- New router without IDs: /article-categories/bakery-dairy/photo-gallery/products/cakes
Path to Joomla 4.0
The Joomla dev team notes that, Joomla 4.0 will be largely using and supporting namespaced PHP codes. Joomla 3.8 will start using namespaced class names, while existing class names will remain supported until Joomla 5.0. This will enable the extension/template developers to move towards the new standards seamlessly, at the same time, the journey to the next big thing starts here.
Joomla 3.8 Release Timeline
The Joomla 3.8 plan announcement blog post reads a clear-cut timeline for the new version of the CMS. Here is what it looks like.
- Feature freeze: July 14, 2017
- First Joomla 3.8 beta: Around the week of July 24, 2017
- Joomla 3.8 stable release: Within mid September, 2017
Mostly, this is the talk of the Joomla town right now. To learn more about the Joomla 3.8 plans, please visit the official blog post here. You can find more resources and ways to contribute to the project there.
What do you expect from Joomla 3.8? Please share your ideas and expectations via comments below.
