What's new in Joomla 3.6?

On July 12, 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 will tell you more about the new features.

Category creation from an article

In version 3.6 you do not necessarily have to go to the Category Manager to add new categories. You can create a category directly from an article.

Show all Menu items

When you have a website with many different menus, think of a multilingual websites then it was often a while searching before you found the right menu items to edit. Joomla 3.6 has a menu option "All Menu Items" 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, there are 2 ways to uniquely find out which modules are associated with 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 Unassigned and Unpublished modules can now be hidden.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 show only 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.

Removal of 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.

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 the HTTP headers and improvements have also been made for cookies. This change allows large Joomla sites to better handle Varnish and that will be a significant improvement regarding 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 the 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 the logs are also an administrative function. Sometimes too location /logs/ 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.