What's new in Joomla 3.7?

Custom fields

Custom Fields, or adding additional fields in Joomla is a fantastic extension in Joomla 3.7. You can add optional fields to your articles and users.
The fields you can create with the following types:

• Users
• User group
• Integer
• Calendar
• Radio button
• Colour
• List
• Image list
• Media
• SQL
• Checkboxes
• Text line
• Text area
• Editor
• URL

These field types are plugins, therefore it will also become possible to develop your own field types.

Multilingualism Associations

This is an improvement for mulitlanguage configuration. A component will be added that makes it easier to start translating texts. Articles will be displayed side by side in the different languages. When you save the articles, the association is automatically made between the two articles, something you always had to set up manually before.

Improved language installation function

Until now, you had to create the 'language content' manually by entering the country codes, which could be confusing because we needed to know what is the label or original title of the language we are configuring. In Joomla 3.7, it will be created automatically as soon as you install a language package in Joomla.

Global settings options are shown

You cannot remember all the settings from all the settings related to the global options. Now the default options including their values are displayed in an overview. So you no longer have to go back and search for what the (default) settings are.

Backend menu manager

Besides the ability to create a menu for the frontend, from Joomla 3.7 onwards you can also create your own backend menu. This will be a useful feature for developers who need to deliver a website for their client and want to keep the menu as simple as possible.

Flat UI for the administrator

A new flat UI design has been created for the administrator area, the backend of Joomla This makes the whole thing look completely 2017 again.

TinyMCE update

There will be a new TinyMCE editor plugin that allows you to easily add, move or remove buttons.

In Joomla 3.7, there will be some new buttons in the TinyMCE editor. These include a "contact" button that lets you insert a link to a contact and a "menu" button to insert a link to a menu item in the content of the article. Custom fields will also have their own button added.

In addition, there are currently 3 levels of TinyMCE editor functionality: Simple, Advanced and Extended. Each of them displayed a different set of buttons on the editor toolbar. Additional sets of buttons will probably be available in Joomla 3.7 such as drag and drop in the toolbar. This feature gives you freedom in toolbar configuration as you decide where will and which buttons will be displayed on the editor toolbar. This way, you can create your own editor for each user group.

Improved media manager

The new Joomla media manager will be equipped with significant changes and improved features. This will give users more control over uploaded images. Users can crop images, resize, rotate and run basic filters in the backend of their website. The media manager will also have functionality for creating thumbnails of different image sizes and it will also include options for labels to the uploaded media files.

New date and time selection option

This is a minor tweak being implemented, but the date and time select option has been improved.