6 Possible New Features in Joomla 3.7

: Written by Steve Burge Steve Burge; Published: 28 September 2016 28 September 2016

Joomla developers are working hard on Joomla 3.7, and they are proposing a lot of exciting changes.

In this post, I'm going to give you a preview of 6 new features that may be added to Joomla 3.7.

We're not even at the Alpha phase of development for 3.7 yet, so nothing is set in stone. I'm sure the developers would love more feedback and testing on these great ideas. I've added a Github link next to each proposed improvement, so you know how to get involved.

#1. Custom fields

This will be the headline feature, if it's included in Joomla 3.7. You will be able to add custom fields to articles, user profiles and contact forms.

When adding articles, you'll see two new tabs on the left: Fields and Field Categories.

The code for these fields is based on a Joomla extension called DPFields. There were over 20 different field options available in DPFields, and I expect we'll see a similar set of options in Joomla 3.7. Here's an overview of the fields we might see:

Calendar
Captcha
Checkboxes
Color
Editor
Email
Image
Integer
List
Media
Article
Radio buttons
SQL
Telephone
Text
Textarea
Timezone
URL
User
Usergroup
Yes or No

You can see more details of this proposed change on Github

#2. A flat re-design for the admin area

There have been several tweaks to the Joomla admin area since the launch of Joomla 3, but this would be the largest overhaul. The plan is to modernize the admin template with more flat design elements. The screenshot below gives a preview of the changes. As a teacher, I'm not to happy about this one, because we'll need to re-do our videos to match. However, I do agree that it's a good-looking design refresh.

You can find out more via these Github issues.

#3. Facebook login

This would add a Facebook authentication plugin so people can log in to Joomla with their Facebook account. There is already a GMail version of this in the Joomla core.

To make the Facebook login work, the team also made another very useful change: authentication plugins can add their own fields to Joomla's login screens. This will provide a standard process for any extension that needs social network authentication or single sign-on integration. You can find out more via these Github issues.

#4. Configure TinyMCE features

This feature would allow you to customize the default editor. You would be able to open the TinyMCE editor plugin and add, move or remove buttons. Find out more on Github.

#5. Add articles with menu links

This would remove several steps from the Joomla site-building process. You would be able to create an article while you're adding a menu link. See the GIF below for a preview, and see Github for more info.

#6. New date and time picker

This is a relatively minor change compared to some of the others on this list, but one proposed change would update Joomla's date and time picker. Find out more on Github.