When you already upgraded your site from Joomla! 1.5 to Joomla! 1.7 in 2011 you probably use all the new features introduced with Joomla! 1.6 and 1.7. When you scroll down and read the list of new features compared to Joomla! 1.5 then you realize that 2011 was a very interesting year for Joomla!.
But let's have a closer look on the new features for Joomla! 2.5.
The Joomla Platform Version 11.3 is now the base of the CMS.
That means many more possibilities for third party developers e.g. image manipulation with the JImage class and generation of HTML tables with the JGrid class. A new version of the JavaScript library MooTools is used (1.4). If you don't know what Joomla! platform is about, read Write your own App using Joomla! Platform and the official annoucement of the Joomla Platform release.
Search is "reinvented" in Joomla! 2.5 with Finder. The new finder component works with a search index (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Creating the search index
Finder pre-searches your content. Search results are scored dynamically based on the context and frequency of search terms. The most relevant content will always be listed at the top of the results. It suggests alternative phrases (Figure 2) and its pluggable adapter system allows to install new search adapters which provide support for standard Joomla! content and many other types of documents. Custom search filters allows you to provide contextual searching when your visitor is looking at particular sections of your Web site.
Figure 2: Suggestions
With Joomla! 2.5 it will be possible to run Joomla! on MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Drivers for PostgreSQL and Oracle seems to be very near (Getting Ready for Multi-Database Support).
You can user the default offline message, disable it or create a customized message. Additionally you can select an image for the offline mode page (Figure 3). You have even a possibility to set the site to offline mode during installation so no unauthorized people can see it before you want them to.
Figure 3: Offline mode options
A CAPTCHA plugin using the reCAPTCHA service can be enabled (Figure 4). Once you sign up for free with reCAPTCHA and enter your keys, you can enable CAPTCHA on new user registrations. It could also be used by other extensions needing CAPTCHA.
Figure 4: CAPTCHA
You can now attach an image for the intro text to use in blog and featured layouts, an image for the full article text and up to three links for the full
article layout. This means that your content creators won’t have to fuss with an image in the text and your article format will be cleaner and more consistent.
The Beez core template comes with mobile enhancements.
You can override the default language strings in a new manager in the backend (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Language overrides manager
User Notes can be attach notes to users as well as assign tracking dates to the users. You can have multiple notes per user and the notes can be in different categories (Figure 6).
Figure 6: User notes manager
Filtering for Categories in Article Manager
That is simply useful. Since Joomla! 1.6 it was possible to filter categories in the article manager, but you did not see the articles of the subcategories. Now the filter logic include the articles of the subcategories too.
Linking New Menus with a Module
In Joomla! 2.5 modules are NOT automatically created for each new menu type. This is not a bug, it's a feature :)
Not everyone used the core menu module, but used instead ones from a custom template or third party module. For that reason, menus did not automatically create a module in 1.6/1.7. This change confused people and created extra work. In Joomla 2.5, if there is no module associated with the menu, there is a link showing in the Menu Manager that you can click that will take you directly into a new module that you can create. You then have the choice of saving this standard menu module or cancelling out and using a different menu module.
Custom Text Filters are moved to the global configuration. They are filtering content for black and white listed tags based on your configuration and on role permission.
You can now choose to have the administrator get a new message when a user creates an account. This is useful when the New User Account Notification is set to Self. In that case the user receives after an email after registration with an activation link (Figure 7). After clicking that link the account is activated.
Figure 7: Administrator Notification
The extensive options in “Select a Menu Item Type” are not loaded unless you need them.
In comparison to Joomla! 1.5 the differences are huge and there is a long list of features and improvements.
Here is a list of the most important changes in Joomla 1.6 and 1.7
There are many more very nice little features like the possibility to place a background image into a module or to display articles with page breaks in a tab or slider layout.
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