The Joomlashack Blog

What Are the Plans for Joomla 3.5?

Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge
Published: 13 July 2015 13 July 2015
Joomla 3.5 and 3.6

The Joomla team released version 3.4 in February, and then there have been several smaller releases including 3.4.3 this month.

So, after a break of several months since a major release, what expectations should we have for Joomla 3.5?

Release dates

Joomla 3.4.3 has just come out and Joomla team will probably release 3.4.4 next. After that, it's on to an alpha release of 3.5.

The estimated release date for 3.5 is in October.

Joomla 3.6? It's possible that we'll see it in the first quarter of 2016.

What's new in Joomla 3.5?

There are four main changes coming in 3.5.

  1. Nic Dionysopoulos from Akeeba has added a system to provide email notifications for Joomla updates.
  2. Hannes Papenberg has been working for years on improvements to Joomla's routing system. He even ran a fundraising campaign to support his work. Hannes is developing a final Pull Request, and after that it's time to do thorough testing.
  3. com_messages will be removed. We've covered the Messages extension before, saying that few people understand how to use it.
  4. Drupal and WordPress have done this for a while. Now Joomla will have a plugin to gather data about what platform it's users are on. This data will include the PHP version, database type/version, Joomla version and OS type/version. The data will be anonymised data and there will be an opt-out feature. This information should make it possible for the Joomla team to make more informed decisions about which versions and platforms to support.

Are there any plans for Joomla 3.6 yet?

One major hope for Joomla 3.6 is the integration of webservices via a REST API.

There was a "Make It Happen" session at this year's JandBeyond in Prague, which resulted in an initial commit of the part of the RedCore code into Joomla. RedCore is a Rapid Application Development library that's already being used for RedComponent extensions. If you haven't heard of RedCore before, it was introduced at our Joomla 3 Day last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzJkC7f9fJE

Joomla didn't use the whole of RedCore, but has adopted the Webservices features. There's a full documentation site for RedCore available here.

Want to find out more?

The Joomla roadmap is available here.