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Joomla! 3.5 Released; Open Source CMS Dramatically Improves User Interface for Developers and Administrators

NEW YORK, NY, March 21, 2016 - Joomla!, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to mobile applications, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla! 3.5.

The newest version of the CMS is intended to dramatically improve the user experience for developers and administrators through the introduction of 34 new features, including support for the recently released PHP7 scripting language, which significantly increases web site speed. The 3.5 update also includes email update notifications, a drag and drop image management tool, and an anonymized statistics collection plug-in - a safe data collection mechanism - that will help planning for future development of the CMS.

"With every version of Joomla!, we gather and act upon feedback from our community of more than a half a million contributors to investigate and develop new features. We aim to provide those who use our CMS with the best user experience, and to be at the forefront of the trends in how that content is consumed,” said Roland Dalmulder, a member of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “Our user’s experience is critical, and so we are excited about this release as it was designed specifically to make improvements in this area.”

This version of Joomla supports the most recent release of Zend’s PHP, the most popular programming language for serving up web pages. PHP7 was recently announced with significant performance improvements and is now available for use by the general public. Joomla users can now enjoy the benefit of that performance improvement. Joomla still provides legacy PHP support going back to PHP version 5.4 for web servers that have not yet upgraded.

Joomla’s new email update notification plugin periodically checks for available Joomla updates and bug fixes, then emails administrators to notify them. Previously, notification was only available by logging in to the Joomla back-end, or signing up for the Joomla Security News mailing list. 3.5’s new stat collection plug-in gathers data such as the environment the CMS is being run on and which features are enabled. The raw data collected is anonymized before transmission, and access to the aggregate data will be restricted to Joomla’s core developers.

The goal with the release of 3.5, according to Dalmulder was, “to allow its developers and administrators to achieve higher efficiencies, and an easy feedback loop, while still remaining recognizably Joomla.”

In addition to the features mentioned above, other highlights of the 3.5 release include:

  • Download system, environment information: gives users the option to download system/environment information for support purposes

  • Ability to add a user CSS file to Protostar: currently it is impossible to use a custom.css file when using the Protostar template. This update adds a check to see if the file user.css exists and loads the file to allow for user customization.

  • 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

  • Article counts: a set of pull requests that allows the visual presentation of published, unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds

  • Email tests: users can now test email addresses with one click

  • 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

  • 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.

Version 3.5 is a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than three million Joomla forum posts, nearly 675-thousand Joomla forum members and data from more than 7,500 Joomla extensions. For a full list of Joomla 3.5’s new features, or to download Joomla 3.5, go to http://joomla.org/3.

About Joomla!

Joomla is one of the world's most popular software packages used to build, organize, manage and publish content for websites, blogs and mobile applications. With about 3 percent of the web running on Joomla, the free open source Content Management System (CMS) powers the web presence of hundreds of thousands of small businesses, governments, non-profits and large organizations worldwide like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald's and Sony. The award-winning CMS is led by an international community of more than a half million active contributors, helping the most inexperienced user to seasoned web developer make their digital visions a reality. Joomla's power and extensibility has resulted in its software being downloaded more than 65 million times.