Joomla 3.0 has taken web design and development to a whole new level. The Joomla CMS has been around for a long time, and each update has improved the platform, but Joomla 3.0 is a massive shake-up for it. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting additions for this version of the platform:
Mobile Ready
Joomla 3.0 greatly improves on what was, until recently, a weakness of this CMS. Older versions were sluggish and overly complex to navigate on mobile platforms. Joomla 3.0 includes a “responsive” template for the main site, and another for the admin panel, making it easy to use, and administrate, Joomla sites from any mobile device.
Easier For Beginners
Joomla’s strength has always been its flexibility, but that flexibility came at a price – usability. Joomla 3.0 is much easier to install, and to manage. The update comes with a new streamlined 30 second installer, and the admin panel has been tweaked to make it much easier to navigate.
Improved Developer Experience
The developer experience has been improved. Thanks to improvements to the JUI library, jQuery and LESS CSS, developers can now do more with less code, similar as for Magento support. The Icomoon font icon library comes with retina-display optimized icons, empowering developers to make sites optimized for iOS devices with retina displays.
Other Improvements
In addition to the above improvements, Joomla 3.0 also features several back-end improvements, security and performance enhancements, and other general tweaks, including an upgrade to the latest version of TinyMCE.
You should back up your database before upgrading, however – the update makes several changes to the database and cleans up a lot of old code. If you have a heavily modified site you may encounter some problems.
Joomla is free and open source, and the update is a free download. If you’re running Joomla, it’s well worth upgrading, and if you aren’t running Joomla, there’s never been a better time to revisit this flexible and powerful CMS. If you tried it a few versions ago, but found it slow, cumbersome or confusing, it’s worth revisiting the platform today. It’s come a very long way in the last few years.