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What's new in Joomla 3.6?

On 12 July 2016, Joomla version 3.6 will be released. As we are used to, there will again be many improvements in this version. In this article, I'll tell you more about the new features.

Creating a category from within an article

In version 3.6, you don't necessarily need to go to the Category Manager to add new categories. You can create a category directly from an article.

Show all menu items

If you have a website with many different menus, think e.g. a multilingual website it was often a bit of a search before you found the right menu items to edit. Joomla 3.6 has a "All Menu Items" menu option, making it much easier to find links.

Last visit date in user management

It's nice to know when a registered user registered, but it can be equally important to know when the user last logged in. The user management in Joomla 3.6 now includes the "last visit date".

Viewing modules by menu item

From Joomla 3.6 onwards, there are 2 ways to find out which modules are linked to a particular menu item.

  1. When you are editing a menu item, the "Module Assignment" page is very useful. Unassigned and Unpublished modules can now be hidden. So this way, you only show the relevant modules for this page
  2. In module management, there is now an additional search box to find which modules are assigned to a particular menu link.

Remove all cached items in Joomla

This is a small but useful improvement: you can now easily clear the cache of all items via a single "Clear all" button.

Permissions management for individual menus

In previous versions, you could set permissions for all menus. With Joomla 3.6, you can now edit menu permissions for individual menus. Go to menus > manage, then choose a menu and click "Edit"

Reinstalling Joomla

You can now update Joomla by uploading a new version of the Joomla core files. This is really useful if you encounter problems while adjusting settings of your site or if some core files have been modified after your website has been hacked.
Go to Components > Joomla Update > Upload & Update to use this feature.

Better support for Varnish cache

Earlier versions of Joomla did not work well with the Varnish cache system, or the web acceleration features for Nginx. Joomla had problems with sessions, the feature for remembering and identifying pages to be excluded for cache.

Joomla 3.6 includes improvements to HTTP headers and improvements have also been made for cookies. This change allows large Joomla sites to handle Varnish better, which will be a significant improvement in terms of the speed of your website. More details on the changes with Varnish cache.

The Template Manager supports SASS and SCSS files

This is a very useful feature when you use modern css techniques usage. With the template manager, you couldn't see the SASS or SCSS files before, from now on you can.

The logs folder has been moved to administrator

On new installations of Joomla, the logs folder can now be found in /administrator/logs instead of /logs.

The /administrator folder is easier to protect and logs is also an administrative function. Sometimes the /logs/ location also clashes with servers that have their own folder with the same name. Plesk is an example of a server utility that often uses the /logs folder for its own purposes. Having problems with the log file? Then read the article Cannot write to log file in the Joomla knowledge base.

Need help with this update?

Jeroen Moolenschot

About Jeroen

I have been working with the Joomla! CMS since 2006. Besides building and maintaining Joomla! websites and webshops, I am also familiar with search engine optimization (SEO), Joomla hosting and developing templates and extensions. Furthermore, I am a frequent visitor and speaker at JoomlaDays and various Joomla user groups.

I am committed to the Joomla! community as a member of the Extensions Directory team and the organization of Joomla user group Breda and JoomlaDagen Netherlands. In short: Are you looking for a Joomla Specialist, you should contact me!

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