Yesterday, Joomla developers announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.3. The newest Joomla CMS overhauls its approach to security, enables microdata for the first time and replaces MooTools-based JavaScript with jQuery equivalents. These new features make Joomla 3.3 the most secure, searchable and fastest-loading Joomla CMS yet.
Joomla is one of the world's most popular software packages used to build, organize, manage and publish content for websites, blogs, Intranets and mobile applications. With more than 3 percent of the Web running on Joomla and a CMS market share of more than 9 percent, the free open source software powers the web presence of hundreds of thousands of small businesses, governments, non-profits and large organizations worldwide like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald's and Sony.
"Joomla has experienced unprecedented growth recently, blowing through 50 million downloads at the end of February to more than 52 million today," said Sarah Watz, newly elected president of Open Source Matters, a nonprofit that provides organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "Despite this massive surge, we are continuing to make improvements to ensure Joomla is cutting-edge for our user community of millions of people around the globe."
Additional details about the key features in Joomla 3.3 include:
- Minimum PHP version is 5.3.10: This substantially enhances the level of cryptography that can be used for securing passwords.
- jQuery JavaScript: By moving from MooTools to jQuery JavaScript, the size of Joomla websites will be reduced, ultimately enabling sites to load faster.
- Microdata implementation: This allows many aspects of the content rendered by the Joomla CMS to be explained to search engines using semantic information. Ultimately, this enables Joomla websites to be more searchable (search engine optimization).
"Some of the enhancements in Joomla 3.3 came from Joomla student developers from last summer's Google Summer of Code, and we expect more cutting-edge developments from those contributors in upcoming releases," said Chad Windnagle, Google Summer of Code Co-Admin for Joomla. "Although the Joomla community has come up with amazing enhancements, it is important that we stay as current as possible by tapping contributions from the next generation of Internet pioneers like the Google Summer of Code students."
Joomla 3.3 is available for download at Joomla.org. For those curious, you can also check out a demonstration of Joomla 3.3 at Joomla's demo site.