We have now released the Alpha 2 version of the new 3.7 release. We moved the date a week to include some more features and now we think we have all features merged. That doesn't mean that all is perfectly running. There are issues to fix and we need a lot more testing. But we are thinking that the state is good enough that we can publish the version and ask for help in testing.

With the "Custom Fields" feature we had a good experience in merging it into a release early. Having it published and available for a larger group of people speeds up the process of making a feature better and solid.

The Joomla! 3.7.0 Alpha 2 Release has two new key features:

Multilingual Associations Manager

This is a result of a GSOC project and some tweaks by Robert Deutz. The functionality is briefly explained here.

The Multilingual Associations Manager allows you to make translations from content into another language using one interface. Third-party extension developers can make their extensions ready for integrating this new feature.

Backend Admin Menu Manager

We had more than one attempt to extend our menu management to the admin area of the CMS. This time it looks as if we will have one in the next stable release. There is more work to do with this feature, but we have 11 weeks to go and we are sure we will make it happen.

With this feature you can create and use a custom admin menu that exists beside the preset admin menu.

A special thanks to Izhar Aazmi who coded the feature. (see https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/13036 for more information).

In Alpha 1 we already merged the Custom Fields and the new Routing feature. A list of the other features merged into the new Joomla! 3.7 can be found here.

Please test and submit your findings to the Joomla! Issue Tracker.

Download Full and Update Packages here.