Joomla 3.7.0 Release Highlights

The Joomla! Content Management System Team released Joomla! 3.7.0 at the end of April. This is an exciting release with many new features.

One new feature that is the most exciting to us is the addition of custom fields.  Custom fields can now be added to articles, user profiles and contacts, significantly extending the functionality that can be incorporated without a need to add additional components or plugins.  Why is that exciting?  Less to be updated; less bulk to slow down your website; less opportunity for security issues.

Workflow improvements have been incorporated into this release. You can now create an article, category and menu item all in one step. While that seems to be pretty minor, anything that saves steps provides compound benefits over time.

Backend users will notice the new flatter and more modern look to the interface.

There have also been significant improvements for those needing to manage multilingual sites.

Over all, there were over 700 additions, improvements and bug fixes to Joomla! And, all done by volunteers from around the globe (unlike WordPress and Drupal, which have company backers)! If you would like to see more about this release, check out the announcement on the Joomla.org website.

All eKamria managed websites with current maintenance agreements were upgraded to the new release in early May.

Joomla 3.7.1 Security Release

With over 700 changes, you would expect that there would probably be some items that need fixing once the software is tested on websites from around the world. And, sure enough, it happened. The team at Sucuri found a critical security bug in the new release. It was reported to the Joomla! Team and we were all notified to backup our websites immediately and to expect a fix in a few days.

The fix was released at 10:00 am on Wednesday and all Joomla! websites managed by eKamria were updated within 5 hours. This release also fixed other minor bugs that had been reported.  For more information about the 3.7.1 release, check out the announcement on the Joomla.org website