The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of the first Joomla 3.9 Release Candidate. Joomla users and extension developers are asked to download and install the package in order to provide quality assurance for the forthcoming 3.9 release.

Joomla 3 is the latest major version of the Joomla CMS, with 3.9 being the tenth minor release in this series.

Please note that going from 3.8 to 3.9 is a one-click upgrade and is NOT a migration. The same is true for any subsequent versions in the 3 series of the CMS. That being said, please do not upgrade any of your production sites to the release candidate version as this release is ONLY intended for testing and there is no upgrade path from non-stable releases.

What’s new in Joomla 3.9?

Joomla 3.9, it’s over 200 new features, improvements and bug fixes! Its main purpose is to introduce a Privacy Tool Suite into Joomla CMS to facilitate the compliance of your sites and to make developers’ life easier to get their extensions compliant with laws and regulations such as GDPR.

To make your life easier, we are pleased to inform you that you can also test Joomla 3.9 RC directly at launch.joomla.org

The Privacy Tool Suite Extensions

• The Privacy System
  This is the heart of law and regulation related capabilities and provides several subsystems which will help with the compliance of your Joomla websites. Among other things, you’ll be able to display a consent checkbox on your forms, export and/or remove personal data further to an information request and check the privacy related capabilities of extensions.
  
  
• The Action Logging System
  This system provides an infrastructure to create an audit log of activity performed on a website and can be fine tuned to the site admin's preferences. You’ll be able to review the action log, export it and purge the entries.

To learn more about the new extensions linked to the Privacy Tool Suite, we invite you to read the Alpha blog post as well as the related pull request at GitHub.
Browse our dedicated documentation to learn to use these new features.

Joomla 3.9, it’s even more new features

• Little features that make a big difference when it comes to easy content management
  • Add notes to your articles in the backend, and filter them #19134
  • A new search feature in the backend: search for a specific article content #20083
  • Load a module by ID into your article #19362
• More flexibility for custom fields with two new options
  • A repeatable custom field is now available #20243
  • Create alternative layouts to fit your needs #18571
• Most recent frontend changes
  • Display the intro or full image in your newsflash module #20169
  • Show only the articles from a specific author in your latest articles module (#20687), and more options!
• New features for multilingual sites
  • A new toolbar button to edit associations #21022
  • Propagate existing associations #21321
  • Display your tags per language #19509
• Use Google Invisible reCAPTCHA on your websites #18146
• Argon2id Password is now supported #20855
• And even more!

A full list of Joomla 3.9 features and issues resolved can be found on GitHub.

What is this release for?

This is a Release Candidate release, that should only be used on test sites.
Extension and template developers are encouraged to work with this release in order to prepare extensions for the stable release of Joomla 3.9, though there shouldn't be any backward compatibility issues.
Users are encouraged to test the package for issues and to report them in the Joomla CMS Issue Tracker.

When is the stable release due?

The release of Joomla 3.9 Stable is expected for 23 October 2018.

Please note that the specific date of releases depends on availability of volunteers and circumstances beyond our control.
The most up-to-date information regarding this timeline can be found in our project roadmap. You can join the testing and reporting to help ensure a solid, timely delivery (see "How can you help…" below).

A huge Thank You to our volunteers!

Joomla 3.9 is the result of thousands of hours of work by dozen of volunteers. A big thank you goes out to everyone that contributed to this release.
A special massive thank you goes to Michael Babker, Tuan Pham Ngoc, Nicola Galgano, Brian Teeman and Hannes Papenberg who did an amazing work on making the Privacy Tool Suite a reality.

How can you help Joomla development?

There are a variety of ways in which you can get actively involved with Joomla. It doesn't matter if you are a coder, an integrator, or merely a user of Joomla. You can contact any one of our Production members, to get more information.
You can also help by writing/improving/updating the Joomla 3.9 documentation.

Help the Joomla 3.9 Marketing Team!

The copywriting for the forthcoming landing page for Joomla 3.9 is available for translation at Crowdin. Make a gift to your local community by translating the site in your language!

Don’t forget to watch our video introducing this release.
We have also a wide range of “coming soon” imagery you can share and translate, which can be found here.
We would love you to spread the Joomla love and get the word out to your network.