Joomla 3.2 User Experience Improvements

For Joomla 3.2, the Joomla User Experience Team focused on improving the user experience for Joomla site administrators. In this article, we will outline several of the user experience changes in Joomla 3.2. There is also a great video walk through of these new features on YouTube.

In this tutorial:

Dashboard Article Manager Article Editor Module Editor Hover Editor

Joomla Administrator Dashboard

Contains submenu and system menu on left of page, quick links on right of page

Links under quicklinks were moved and grouped together with similar links in the submenu and system links
Site title and Joomla logo moved from the left to the top right of the screen

Article Manager

Article filtering options located on the left of the page
The hover drop down menus, which contained the options to edit / unpublish / featured / archive / trash, was not accessible and duplicated code

Article filtering options can now be found / hidden by clicking the Search tools button next to the search form
Article state options have been moved under the Status column and are now accessible

Article Editor

The textarea for the article editor was small, making it difficult for some to edit
Under the editor window was the Images and links settings, which are not commonly used

The editor window is much larger
Tiny MCE editor version 4 is being used
Article alias now visible at the top of the editor (vs. the Publishing Options tab)
The right menu now contains the category dropdown menu
Images and links settings are now located within their own tab

Module Manager: Module Custom HTML

The Custom Output is the most important feature of the module, but must be accessed via a tab

The Custom Output data, i.e. the custom html you want to show, is found on the first page of the module editor
The module’s settings have been moved to the right sidebar of the page

Front End Menu / Module Editor

In Joomla 3.2, when you’re logged into the front end as an administrator (or any other user with editing rights), a mouseover menu appears when hovering over menus and modules.

When you hover over the edit button, you immediately see the module position and the type of module you’re looking at (i.e. Latest Articles / Login Form module). If you click on the edit button, a new tab will open and load the module editor.

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