What's new in Joomla 3.9?

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

Privacy Tool

In a previous article I reported in detail about the Privacy component that will be included in the new Joomla version. In short, this tool consists of 2 parts.

The privacy system.

This system has AVG / GDPR related features 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 Web site and can be tailored to the site administrator's preferences. You can view the log, export and clean up entries.

Small touches, big impact

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

Note field in articles

Previously, 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 the articles.

Searching for content in the backend

Are you looking for a certain word you 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 you can use content:keyword, you want all articles where you e.g. the word "price" used, 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 multiple modules in a position or use a particular type more often, so it would be more convenient to be able to load a specific module. This is now possible by including the module id in { loadmoduleid 12345 }.

Google Invisible reCAPTCHA

The latest version of Google's reCAPTCHA has an "invisible" variant. This Google Invisible reCAPTCHA is from now on standard to use in Joomla's contact forms and other components that use this option.

Disable article hits

In the article options there is now an option to disable the counter of article views.

Filtering by month

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

Registration option for using domain names

Would you like to allow only 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 which can repeat itself. This allows you to use 1 field type to add information to multiple fields. 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 news flash module

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

Filter the newest articles by author

If you are using the latest articles module, you can now filter on 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 convenient to immediately edit the article in another language. For this purpose a new button has now been added to the toolbar. When you click it you go 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 the Github page of Joomla