What's New in Joomla 3.0?

Here is a quick walk-through of the major new features in Joomla 3. 

Transcription

Hi, this is Richard Pearce from Build a Joomla Website. The latest version of Joomla - version 3.0 - has been released and in this video I’ll take you through the major new features. For more information, check out the Joomla 3 announcement.

Twitter Bootstrap

The first and biggest change to mention is the integration of Twitter Bootstrap. This is a set of tools, provided by the folks at Twitter, that provide solutions for features like navigation, thumbnails and typography. This is going to be particularly useful for the Joomla Administrator. Developers can now use a common set of tools so extensions have a consistent look and feel. Because extension developers have the freedom to do what they want, this has led to an inconsistent user interface between extensions which in turn leads to a poor user experience. Introducing the Bootstrap framework into Joomla also makes life easier for developers as the backend interface has essentially already been designed.

Mobile Friendly

Big feature number two stems from the first. The Bootstrap framework makes it easy to create mobile-friendly designs. Both the Joomla 3 default Administrator template and new frontend template are what’s known as “responsive”. This means the content placement varies based on the device being used to view the page. No additional extensions are required to achieve this result - it’s built right into the Joomla 3 core.

Web Installer

The installer has received a major overhaul in both look and function. The PostgreSQL database is now supported which means there are now three database options since the introduction of MS SQL Server support in version 2.5.

Language Packages

Language Packages can now be installed via Administrator, although technically this feature was introduced in 2.5.7.

Guest User Group

The Joomla ACL changes introduced into version 1.6, saw among other things a feature called the Guest User Group. When setup correctly, it allows you to hide content from logged in users. For example, you might have a Custom HTML module that displays an image labelled “Become a Member”. It’s doesn’t make sense to display this to users who have logged in, so this module should have an access level assigned that means it is only shown to non-logged-in users. The Guest User Group provides this function and from version 3, the setup required for this is already in place. So now all you have to do is go to the appropriate module, article or menu item and set the Access Level to Guest.

Save Articles Without Content

This next one is a bit obscure, but some will appreciate that in Joomla 3 it is now possible to save an article without any body content. You still need a title, but in the past Joomla required some content in the text box too.

That’s my look at some of the new features in Joomla 3. The Joomla Project is recommending to hold off jumping to this new version straight away as it is rather new and it will take some time until extension developers catch-up. It’s a good idea to stick with version 2.5 for now and update later. The most stable version of Joomla 3 is scheduled for release in September 2013.