It is simple to upgrade your Joomla 3.0 to 3.1. Within Softaculous, you can upgrade to 3.1 with a one-click upgrade. You can also run a Joomla 3.0 upgrade within the Joomla “Update” component. If you want to get the new features and newest security fixes, you will need to upgrade. Joomla Developers will continue “Beta Releases” until the Long Term Support (LTS) version is released.
The full Long Term Support release will be 3.5. If you are not planning on using any of the below features, then you do not need to upgrade. You can wait till the LTS 3.5 release to upgrade. If you need more information on the new features that Joomla 3.1 provide, please see the following sections on the new features and security fixes.
Announced new features from the developers of Joomla 3.1
To help determine whether or not you will want to upgrade your Joomla site the the 3.1 version, review the following new features to see if you even need to upgrade. Below are the announced new features from the Joomla developers.
- Tags
- Added note form field
- Show logs in debug console
- Refactor installation to use new application and MVC classes
- Added pagination in COM_SEARCH component
- Added triggers on save for com_config
- JPlugin autoloadLanguage property
- Added SQL Server subclass for FinderIndexer
- Media wiki package
- OpenStreetMap package
- UNION ALL feature
- Incorporation of Twitter Bootstrap into a jui media package.
- A new responsive administrator template–Isis– and interface.
- A new front end template–Protostar– built using Twitter Bootstrap
- 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
- Extensive work on code style standardisation and consistency
- Unit testing in the CMS
- Updated system tests in the CMS
- Multilanguage: adding items associations in remaining core components.
- Language Installation tool for the Joomla Installer.
- Items associations in multi-language
- Allow different update packages for different version dev levels
Announced core Security fixes in Joomla! 3.1
The Developers of Joomla 3.1 also announced that they fixed Moderate Priority XSS and DOS Vulnerabilities. They also addressed other Low Priority issues like the XSS Vulnerability, Information Disclosure, and Privilege Escalation. For a full information page on Joomla 3.1 please read the article at Joomla on Joomla 3.1 Stable Release.
