What's new in Joomla 3.9?

Joomla 3.9 is released today (30 October 2018) and includes a lot of new features. In this article, I will tell you a bit more about the main new features of Joomla version 3.9. Joomla version 3.9 will add around 250 new features!

Privacy Tool

In an earlier article, I reported in detail on the Privacy component that will be included in the new Joomla version. Briefly, this tool consists of 2 parts.

The privacy system

This system has AVG / GDPR-related capabilities and offers several subsystems that help you comply with this law. Among other things, you can display a consent-selection box on your forms, export and/or delete personal data at the visitor's request and check the privacy-related capabilities of extensions.

The action logging system

This system provides an infrastructure to create an audit log of activities performed on a website and can be tailored to the site administrator's preferences. You can view the log, export and clean up entries.

Small tweaks, big impact

A lot of small changes have been added, but they make managing your website a lot easier.

Note field in articles

Earlier, a note field was added to categories, menus and modules. Now, in the article view, you have a right-hand column and under the "tags" you can now add a short note. In the article view, you can search for a note to filter articles.

Searching for content in the backend

If you are looking for a certain word used in an article, until recently this was only possible in the frontend. In the backend, you could only search for words in the title. From Joomla 3.9 onwards, you can use content:keyword, if you want all articles where you have used the word "price", for example, then search for content:price.

Load module in article or component

Within the content of the website, a module position can be loaded, by { loadposition user1 } or a module type, by { loadmodule mod_login }. You may have several modules in a position or use a certain type more often, so it would be more convenient to be able to load a specific module. This is now possible by incorporating the module id in { loadmoduleid 12345 }.

Google Invisible reCAPTCHA

The latest version of Google's reCAPTCHA has an "invisible" variant. From now on, this Google Invisible reCAPTCHA can be used by default in Joomla's contact forms and other components that use this option.

Disable article hits

The article options now include the option to disable the counter of article views.

Filtering by month

In the category list, for example, there is already an option to filter articles. This can now also be done by month.

Registration option for using domain names

Do you only want to allow people with a specific domain name (e.g. only users with an @company.nl email address). Or exclude people with e.g. .ru, this is now possible. To do this, go to the user overview in the backend to options and then to the Email domain options tab.

New Custom Field type: the Repeatable Field

Thanks to Dutch developer Roland Dalmulder, we can add a new field type to the custom fields collection. A field that can repeat itself. This allows you to use multiple fields with 1 field type to add information. You can choose from an editor, text area, text line, media or number field.

New options in modules

The newsflash and latest articles modules have been updated.

Images in newsflash module

When using the news flash module, it is now possible to display images of the articles. You can choose from the intro or full article image.

Filter the latest articles module by author

If you are using the latest articles module, you can now filter by the person who created the article. Only the articles of a certain author can then be found in the module.

New options for multilingual websites

Multilingual associations button in the toolbar

While editing an article, it can be useful to immediately edit the article in another language. For this purpose, a new button has now been added to the toolbar. Clicking this will take you directly to the appropriate article in the multilingual associations component to edit the article in the other languages as well.

Tags per language

Filtering on tags in the frontend now depends on the chosen language. Also, unpublished tags are no longer displayed in the overview.

A complete list of new features can be found on Joomla's Github page