The Joomla community has announced the availability of Joomla 3.0, the latest release of the popular open-source content management system (CMS) that has been optimized for mobile devices.
Joomla, which is used for everything from Websites to blogs to intranets, brings new functionality in version 3.0 with its ability to natively display content on mobile devices as clearly as it does on a PC or Mac. Joomla 3.0 also delivers new features such as a PostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administrators and a new front-end template.
Joomla 3.0 includes the mobile-friendly Twitter Bootstrap framework. Twitter Bootstrap is a free collection of tools for creating Websites and Web applications. It contains HTML and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, charts, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions.
As going mobile was a core goal for Joomla 3.0, the community decided to focus on the Twitter Bootstrap toolkit because of its popularity as a framework that many other developers and designers already know and work with on a regular basis. Mobile support was key because over time, a native mobile optimization option becomes increasingly important for a Web presence, as IDC predicts that by 2015 mobile Internet will overtake desktop usage.
“As accessing the Internet via a mobile device is becoming more common than accessing it via a desktop computer, the mobile version of a company’s Website will soon be more important than the desktop version,” Paul Orwig, president of Open Source Matters, a nonprofit group created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project, said in a statement. “With every version of Joomla, we use feedback from our community of more than a half a million contributors to add new features that will keep those who use our CMS ahead of what trends will impact the way their content is experienced. By optimizing Joomla 3.0 for mobile devices, there is absolutely no doubt as to whether what was designed for the desktop will transfer seamlessly to a phone or tablet.”
There are more than 15 new features to Joomla 3.0. Other key features include the ability to copy a template, the option to disable the ability to change the Username in Profile and the installation of language packages directly from the extension manager, which makes it easier to manage other languages. Many of these new features have been introduced incrementally since the launch of Joomla 2.5 in January.
However, one of the brand-new features with Joomla 3.0 is the addition of the PostgreSQL driver. This addition means that the CMS is database-independent; it already supports both MySQL and SQL Server.
Joomla 3.0 is a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.6 million Joomla forum posts, nearly 580,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 9,900 Joomla extensions. To download Joomla 3.0, go here.
About 3 percent of the Web runs on Joomla, including hundreds of thousands of small businesses, governments, nonprofit organizations and large organizations worldwide like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, IKEA, McDonald’s and Sony. Joomla surpassed 30 million downloads in April 2012.