This release will be supported for at least 18 months

Jan 25, 2012 13:31 GMT  ·  By

One month after the first beta landed, Joomla 2.5 is here. The big news in Joomla 2.5 is support for Microsoft SQL in addition to MySQL, the first time a different database system has been supported. More are expected to be supported in the future.

Other highlights in this release are update notifications for the main software as well as extensions.

Also new is a natural language search engine which should significantly improve search results relevancy.

"Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, announced.

"No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely," he added.

Microsoft SQL Server support is good news to anyone already using it for other projects. Once other formats are added, more will benefit.

The second big feature is update notifications, for Joomla and installed extensions. Admins will be notified of newer versions, but still have to install them themselves.

The feature comes in very handy now that Joomla has switched to a faster release cycle. Joomla 2.5 is the first long-term release, following the switch,  and will be supported for at least 18 months, but the next version of Joomla lands in six months.

Support for the current Joomla 1.7 will end on February 24, one month after the release of Joomla 2.5. However, support for Joomla 1.5, the current LTS release, will be dropped in April, three months after Joomla 2.5 became available.