SmartSearch Technology: The SmartSearch technology that is now in Joomla 2.5 is probably the biggest addition to this update. For those of you who have larger joomla sites or manage multiple Joomla website, this will stop the current frustration from digging though loads of content and will result in saving a lot of time.
New JPlatform Under the Hood: The new Joomla 2.5 is running on the current Joomla platform developed by all the hard working open source coders in the Joomla community. This new platform is faster and doesn't bog down the platform usage. Think “big power, little footprint”
Multi-DB Support: For the vast majority of you, using MySQL database has worked fine, however for larger Joomla clients, many of them have wanted to expand their options for database use. Joomla 2.5 can now support different databases such as Microsoft, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite and PDO. This offers new possibilities for enterprise level clients who may not like the limitations of the MySQL database.
Update Notification: In Joomla 2.5 you will be able to manually update directly from the Admin panel. Additionally, you can set the system to preform auto-updates, however I would not recommend this in-case there is an error while updating and you’re not available to fix the issue.
Many Other Updates: There are many other smaller updates that have been built into Joomla 2.5 such as built in Captcha capabilities, new menu-to-module linking capabilities, standardized article layouts in respect to images and URLs and greater flexibility in organization and categorization in the backend.
For those of you working in Joomla 1.7, or even Joomla 1.6, this won’t be a huge jump in capability, look and usability. These mini-releases were the building blocks of Joomla 2.5. The biggest jump is for users who are on the last major release, Joomla 1.5, and will upgrade to Joomla 2.5.
In Addition to the Joomla 2.5 release, the higher ups at Joomla have announced that they plan on starting a new release cycle starting in September 2012 with the launch of Joomla 3.0. Every 6-months there will be a half-version followed by a full-version of Joomla released.
For those of you still running Joomla 1.5, now is the time to start planning a version update. This could be done with a website migration, or for some, it may make sense to rebuild a new site to give your online presence a needed face-lift. Whatever boat you are in, the Joomla Web Development experts here at Savvy Panda can help you through the process. Request a free consultation now and let’s plan out a successful strategy.
