We discussed the upcoming Joomla! 3.5 release.  A lot of work has gone into the release, in particular by George Wilson(@gw1992) who is in charge of getting it out.  

There is a release candidate out for testing, please everyone create a backup, and use the backup to install the latest Joomla! release candidate (you need to update your settings or install it manually).  Then test it and feed back any issues you find.  If you need help with this process please comment and one of our team will try to assist.

There is a minor stumbling block on old systems which is being ironed out. The issue is with the move to UTF8 support, which, unfortunately is not a mandatory requirement in old versions of PHP or MySQL. The Joomla! project had no way of knowing how many users or extensions have this issue, but it is hoped this problem will be lessened moving forwards as there is a new statistics plugin which provides anonymous information. The UTF8 issue will cause Joomla! 3.5's release date to be pushed back a little. a. Other new things with Joomla! 3.5

So what's new in Joomla! 3.5?

• Joomla! 3.5 will support PHP7, and PHP7 is twice as fast. Furthermore, some of Joomla! has been rewritten, which means, there will also be some speed increases due to the code too. 
• In Joomla! there has alwasy been a problem with the ISIS template if you install to many components. 
  • The menu becomes too long and you cannot select the component in question. 
  • In J3.5.1 the backend admin menu problem will be solved. 
    • Potential solutions were discussed previously in a JUGL, although it was not any of the suggested solutions that have been used.  Such as: 
      • Making it two columns using css (items sit side by side not in a logical order), 
      • Add a scroll option via CSS. 
      • There were some others that I forget 
  • The article manager now shows the category of the article underneath it.  Gary Barclay, (Joomla Volunteer, Barclay.Works) asked if the new category option in the article manager could be a link. Brian Teeman, (Joomla! founder)  says there may not be a use case. Eoin Oliver, (Joomla! volunteer, Square Balloon) thinks the UX team should be invited to discuss, but Brian says they are redoing the whole layout anyway, which negates the whole argument.
  • Also new in J3.5. The Joomla Content Plugin Buttons have moved up to the top. Much more usable in my opinion, and far more likely to be noticed. 
    • There is a new button load module position. It works very nice, a lovely addition. e. Another new feature… 
  • When in article Manager > categories, you now get a count of the amount of articles within the category. You also get trashed, published and unpublished which can be helpful if deleting a category. You also get the flags for the countries on a multi-lingual system, which looks nice and is great UX, it makes the language easier to identify. 
  • Joomla statistics collection is now implemented as a plugin. It is an optional opt in plugin that shows when you first install or update Joomla!. 
    • You can choose "now", "yes", or "never" from the options. If you ever need to change the selected option you simply go to the plugin. 
    • You can also see what information will be sent to Joomla! from the plugin. 
    • The information is anonymous as there is a random unique id which can be reset. The information Joomla! gathers is the database type, PHP version and the Joomla! version. 
    • You can find the aggregated information from the whole community if you visit developer.joomla.org/about/stats.html 
    • Currently the stats are a little skewed as only one version of Joomla has had this plugin. It will be really useful moving forwards as in the past a lack of knowledge of the lowest system set up held back the project. Also a lack of knowledge of the numbers who are on that type of system. We could have done some cool things but we did not understand our user base. If we know what versions of PHP and MySQL we have then we can do cooler things potentially. 
    • You used to be able to access the raw data here: developer.joomla.org/stats it showed you exactly what is collected, and anyone can use the data. 
    • The plugin doesn't send for the first 6 hours to give you time to change your mind, after that if set to yes, it will send every 6 hours. 
  • 3.5 has new email options in the configuration menu. It hides the sections you do not need depending on which type of email sending service you use. There is also a send test email button. This is useful when setting up your site for the first time to ensure that email is working.