The Joomla! 3.5 new test version was announced in November 2015. Now, five months later, the stable Joomla! 3.5 is officially released.
What’s new in Joomla! 3.5?
The new 3.5 version supports PHP 7, while Joomla! 3.3 requires at least PHP 5.3.10.
If you are using cPanel, you can easily and quickly activate PHP 7 for your website through PHP Manager by SuperHosting.
Please note that it is possible for the website to stop loading properly, if you activate PHP7 with a Joomla version older than 3.5. To recover your website’s operation, downgrade to the previous PHP version.
Read more about the changes made in Joomla! for PHP 7 support: Update to String package 1.3 #6600
Joomla! 3.5 has a plugin that emails the website administrator(s) every time there is a new system update available.
By default the plugin uses the current Joomla! language at the time it is triggered.
To prevent that, you can set a specific language for the notification emails in the plugin’s options. You can also set an email address for receiving the update notifications.
There are a few new improvements and changes in the TinyMCE editor. Buttons which used to be below the content area (Article, Image, Page, Break and Read More) are now part of the editor main menu. There is more:
TinyMCE Images Upload
There is a new feature in the content editor that enables you to upload images by dragging and dropping.
The feature is enabled by default. You can disable it in the editor settings – Extensions -> Plugins -> Editor – TimyMCE.
By default all images are stored in the /images directory. In the plugin’s options you can set a different subdirectory where all images, uploaded via drag&drop will be stored.
Module Insertion in Articles
Another interesting new option is inserting modules directly in the articles content. With the new Modules button you can choose from a list and add the desired modules.
Joomla! 3.5 can collect anonymous user statistics if enabled. The stats are indented to help further system improvements.
When you install a fresh copy of Joomla! 3.5 you will receive a notification from the anonymous stats collection plugin in the backend. No stats will be gathered or submitted unless users express their consent.
The plugin will collect anonymously the server operating system, PHP version, database type and version of the user.
The data is submitted to facilitate Joomla! developers improve future versions.
Anyone can access the collected statistics on Joomla!’s website.
Four new columns are added to the backend, which show categories of the articles, banners, news and contacts. They display the items for each separate category – published, unpublished, trashed and archived.
There is more:
Joomla! 3.5 supports and uses by default utf8mb4 database connection collation (only on servers with MySQL 5.5 or higher).
Joomla extension developers might find useful the following information about collation change of the database tables: from utf8_general_ci to utf8_unicode_ci (utf8mb4_unicode_ci for MySQL => 5.5).
A full list of the fixed bugs, as well as the open and resolved issues is available under the “Joomla! 3.5.0” milestone section on GitHub.