Joomla 3.5 was released in the past week. As I mentioned in a post earlier this year, it was originally scheduled to release in February; however, you know what they say about the best laid plans.

If you have been keeping your Joomla installation up-to-date, this should be an easy update. Simply back up your site and then run the auto-updater.

What’s New in Joomla 3.5

So what’s new in Joomla 3.5? The big news of course is that it supports PHP 7, which allows Joomla to run much faster. The other feature added is a notification system when the platform needs to be updated. WordPress has had this functionality for quite some time. It’s nice to see Joomla adding this feature.

Here is an overview of the other new features from the Joomla site:¹

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• Article counts: a set of updates that allows the visual presentation of published, unpublished and trashed articles in the Category Manager for articles, banners, contacts and newsfeeds.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

In terms of every day use, I think the most useful of these features is the editor buttons added to the toolbar and the addition of a button on the toolbar that allows you to insert a module within an article. I use module within articles all the time and even knowing the tag format well, occasionally I have a typo or an extra space.

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1.  Joomla! 3.5 is Here. Joomla.org Published March 21, 2016. Accessed March 28, 2016. https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5654-joomla-3-5-is-here.html [↩]