Joomla 3.0 was released on September 27th and it marks the first of the STS (standard term support) releases that will culminate with Joomla 3.5 LTS (long term support) release in September of 2013. Joomla 3.0, and the next STS version Joomla 3.1, are intended for early adopters and as such they are not recommended for the vast majority of people for developing their production sites.

What's new in Joomla 3?

Joomla 3 is a major new version of Joomla and as such there are some significant changes. From a users persepctive the first thing you will notice is the all new administration UI that is powered by Twitter's Bootstrap. This HTML and CSS scaffolding allows for consistent styling and more rapid development of HTML interfaces. This is a great bonus for Joomla as it has long suffered from a UI that has not evolved much since the early days of the project. A quick hilight of some of the key features in Joomla 3 include:

• Twitter Bootstrap CSS/LESS files in a JUI package
• New responsive administration template - Isis
• New responsive bootstrap powered front end template - Protostar
• Simplified installation process
• ProstreSQL Database Drivers Support
• New administrator statistic modules
• Improvements to searching
• More code standardization
• Updated to use version 12.2 of Joomla Platform

Of course there are many other new features, changes, and additions, making Joomla 3.0 a very significant release with real usability and functional improvements.

Here is the list of new features in Joomla 3

1. Mobile Ready
Joomla! takes a big leap into the mobile space with a total overhaul of both its frontend design and administrator interface. With the adoption of the Bootstrap framework, Joomla! has become the first major CMS to be mobile ready in both the visitors and administrator areas. Now every website can have mobile friendly content for visitors and mobile friendly tools for administrators.

• Fully Responsive Site Template
• Fully Responsive Admin UI
• Fully Responsive Core Output

2. User Friendly
Joomla administration has a brand new look and feel, built with the power of Bootstrap responsive framework, along with a touch of the awesome UI/UX work of the Joomla JUX team. Joomla comes ready to go and fully responsive for mobile devices, tablets, and normal computer screens. The entire backend of Joomla has a brand new look and feel that will improve your workflow with any type of device.

• New User Friendly Interface
• Streamlined 30 Second Install
• Refined Admin User Experience

3. Developer Tools
Spend less time coding and building interfaces with Joomla 3. The Joomla User Interface (JUI) library gives you a standardized backend & frontend interface via CSS and Javascript Frameworks. LESS CSS and jQuery means you can write less code and the Icomoon font icon library provides a wealth of retina-optimized icons.

• Build a Component with Zero CSS
• Style a Site with 1 CSS File
• Icomoon Font Icon
• jQuery & Mootools

4. Whole Lot More
Joomla 3.0 is a whole new exciting world. We took a little from the top, bottom, and side to create a whole brand new look and feel, along with many features under the hood features that bring Joomla to the forefront of the content management system world.

• Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
• Incorporation of Bootstrap into a jui media package.
• A new responsive administrator template Isis and interface.
• A new frontend template Protostar built using Bootstrap and updated accessible template called Beez3
• PostgreSQL Driver. You will be able to run Joomla 3.0 sites using the PostgreSQL database.
• PHP Memcached Driver
• Use of JFeed for feed management rather than SimplePie
• Installation of language packages directly from the extension manager
• Guest user group present by default
• Saving blank articles allowed
• New administrator statistics module
• Update TinyMCE to version 3.5.6
• Continued clean up of older unused code, files and database fields and tables and improved standardization of tables.
• Improvements to Smart Search
• Unit testing in the CMS
• Updated system tests in the CMS