Joomla 3.0 Released; Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Newly Optimized for Mobile Devices

Joomla, one of the world’s most popular open-source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 3.0. Along with new features such as a PostgreSQL driver, a new user interface for administrators, and a new front-end template, the Joomla CMS can now display content on mobile devices as clearly and distinctly as it does on a personal computer or Mac. This innovation makes Joomla the first major CMS that includes the Twitter Bootstrap framework that enables it to be 100 percent mobile-friendly by default. Over time, a native mobile optimization option becomes increasingly important for a Web presence as global information technology consulting firm 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,” said Paul Orwig, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “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.”

In this release, the goal was to make Joomla 3.0 completely mobile-friendly while still remaining recognizably Joomla. To accomplish this, Twitter Bootstrap was utilized. Bootstrap is an extensive front-end toolkit for developing websites and applications. Using Bootstrap allows Joomla to create a mobile-ready experience based on a popular framework that many other developers and designers already know and work with on a regular basis.

In total, 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.

One of the brand new features with Joomla 3.0 is the addition of the PostgreSQL driver. This addition means that the CMS is truly database independent, as it already is integrated with MySQL and SQL Server.

Joomla 3.0 is truly 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 to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.