Joomla 3 will be released in Spring 2014.
Joomla 2.5 will be supported until then.
The 3.x series will have about 3 years of support.
Joomla 3 New Features
- Redesigned Administrator with modern design and simpler interfaces
- Unified configuration area for Extensions - no more hunting around
- Wider Article editing screen
- jQuery support
- new installer
Joomla 2.5.x to 3 Upgrade Process
Upgrading from Joomla 2.5 to 3 will be a simple one-click upgrade in the Joomla Administrator.
Templates and Third Party Extensions may need to be updated to Joomla 3.
Joomla 3.x Requirements
| Software | Recommended | Minimum |
| PHP (Magic Quotes GPC off) | 5.3.1 + | 5.3.1 + |
| Supported Databases: | ||
| MySQL (InnoDB support required) | 5.1 + | 5.1 + |
| MSSQL | 10.50.1600.1+ | 10.50.1600.1+ |
| PostgreSQL | 8.3.18 + | 8.3.18 + |
Free Joomla 3 Tutorial Book: HTML version | PDF version
What About Joomla 1.5 ?
Support for Joomla 1.5 is officially about to end. Your site will continue to work, but Joomla’s developers will not be releasing new versions for bug fixes or security fixes. It’s recommended to migrate from 1.5.
Joomla 3 New Features in Detail
- Incorporation of Twitter Bootstrap into a jui media package.
- A new responsive, mobile device friendly administrator template--Isis-- and interface.
- A new front end template--Protostar-- built using Twitter Bootstrap.
- Updated accessible template called Beez3.
- A simplified 3-step installation process.
- PostgreSQL Driver. You will be able to run Joomla 3.0 sites using the PostgreSQL database.
- PHP Memcached Driver
- Use of JFeed for feed management rather than SimplePie
- Installation of language packages directly from the extension manager
- Guest user group present by default
- Saving blank articles allowed
- New administrator statistics module
- Update TinyMCE to version 3.5.6
- Continued clean up of older unused code, files and database fields and tables and improved standardization of tables.
- Improvements to Smart Search
- Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
- Unit testing in the CMS
- Updated system tests in the CMS
- Custom active menu item for menu module
- Let the SEF plug-in add the canonical url to the head
- Version 12.2 of the Joomla Platform
