Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Previous versions of Joomla were compatible exclusively with MySQL databases.

“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, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “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.”

Other key features in Joomla 2.5 includes:

• Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
• A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn’t stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”

Joomla 2.5 adheres to Joomla’s newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.

Joomla 2.5 is truly a collaborative community-driven software project developed with the feedback gathered from more than 2.5 million Joomla forum posts, 540,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 8,800 Joomla extensions. To download Joomla 2.5, go to http://www.joomla.org/download.html.

Take a look at this graph for instance:

As you can see, certain systems perform better than others and what I found especially interesting is that contrary to what you might hear on the ‘net, Joomla actually shows quite well from a security standpoint.

As part of the interpretation of this analysis, the author came to this conclusion:

• WordPress only had a single serious vulnerability (in case I interpreted that correctly) — impressive.
• Drupal did also well, only the percentage is a little higher due to the low number of overall issues.
• In contrast to the first two, TYPO3 appeared to not do well at all. It has by far most serious vulnerabilities both in absolute numbers and the percentage. However, I would attribute part of the difference compared to the other projects to TYPO3′s stricter rating of vulnerabilities. One should probably add a CVSS comparison to Drupal to get a more balanced result.
• Joomla, while having the most vulnerabilities overall, did very well with serious ones (meaning it had few of those).
• SilverStripe seems to be floating somewhere between the other projects, neither being exceptionally good or bad.

In addition to the usual bug fixes, some changes to the multilanguage status module. You can read about the improvement to this here: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1522-languages-173-improvements.html

Yesterday, Louis Landry announced his retirement from Joomla Leadership after years of hard work:

Hi all,

As i’ve told most of you over the last few days I am officially retiring form Joomla Leadership.  It has been an incredible journey this past 5+ years, and I thank all of you for the passion, knowledge and fun you’ve shared with me along the way.  We have accomplished so much as a project during my time that it boggles the mind.  To think of how immature and chaotic we were as an organization in the beginning, and where we stand today speaks volumes.

Nothing will ever be perfect in this project (or any other) and there is much to do, but I have complete confidence in you all to continue finding success on the road ahead.  I will continue to contribute heavily to the platform project when I have time, and you all know how to get in touch with me if you need something.  It has been a true honor to work with everyone over the years, I will cherish it always.

Cheers,

Louis

One of the most common criticisms people make when speaking about Joomla! are jabs at its security model, which some consider weak. In all fairness to the Joomla! developers, I think that when you are as popular and widely used as Joomla!, you’re going to be prone to more attempts to hack than say, a less popular CMS. In response to some of these concerns, there has been a lot of focus on security improvements within the CMS of late and this release is no exception to the rule.

That, however, is not all this new release brings. There are a number of exciting new additions. Key updates in the new version include pre-defined search options, a new defense against form manipulation, language specific font settings and more. In addition, the entire Joomla open source community overhauled the development lifecycle for its CMS to make future release dates more predictable, and enabled users to more easily contribute content and migrate to the latest version.

“Security is an important aspect of any CMS. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure your personal or organizational security needs are being met,”

said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team.

“With Joomla 1.7 the user community placed a large emphasis on making the CMS installation process as simple as possible and new versions more frequent. This will allow users to more easily and frequently migrate to the latest version of Joomla, and take advantage of all the security benefits associated with running the newest code. We think Joomla users around the world will really embrace this new process.”

Some of the main enhancements to this version include:

• One Click Version Updating – Update a site to the latest stable Joomla release with just a click. The new built-in updater also handles updates for Joomla and Joomla extensions. This is a major enhancement improving upon the previous system of manually updating individual files on the server.
• Six-Month Release Cycle – A shorter development cycle that will enhance Joomla’s stability by providing more core feature development and adoption. Short-term releases will be in active development for six months, then reach the end-of-life one month after the next version’s release. Long-term support will be active for 15 months, starting with Joomla version 1.8. Version 1.7 will have a support cycle of seven months.
• Joomla Platform Split – The platform (the libraries folder) will now be split from the actual CMS, allowing the Joomla platform to be enhanced outside of Joomla and used for other types of development projects. This will also allow the user community to be more strongly aligned with particular development groups, which will result in more effective and quality development.

A True Open Source Community

The development of 1.7 is a true collaboration by thousands of Joomla developers and millions of everyday users that have downloaded the CMS to date since the Joomla community does not rely on contributions from large software development companies. This includes feedback gathered from more than 2.3 million Joomla forum posts, 490,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 7,900 Joomla extensions. Since 2007, Joomla has been downloaded more than 24 million times, making it by
far, the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the world today.

Joomla is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s, Sony, many large nations and more.

Additional Features Included:

• Better example code for different plug-in types. This enables developers to more easily build custom extensions.
• The ability to automatically validate form data against a list of options during the save operation. This makes it easier to protect against hackers manipulating forms and trying to save invalid data.
• Enables the submit article form to automatically set the article category. This makes it easier for site administrators to restrict users to a specific category meaning content isn’t accidentally added to the incorrect page on a website.
• Multilanguage improvements allows developers/administrators to associate menu items in different languages for faster navigation. Language packs can now also be built to automatically select the best font for that language for the administrative back end.

Visit http://www.joomla.org to download Joomla 1.7 today

Visit http://www.joomla.org/ for more or to download today!

Joomla! is the world’s hottest open source, award-winning content management system written in PHP that uses the MySQL database system to store information. It enables developers to build professional websites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! one of the most popular CMSes available.

Joomla! 1.6 First Look book will give readers an insight into the new features of Joomla! 1.6, showing them what has changed and how the changes will affect them, and how to upgrade to Joomla! 1.6 from the existing Joomla! versions. Furthermore, this book starts off by teaching readers the general changes in interface and basic articles, and then progresses to take them through the changes in menus, control levels, templates, extensions, and SEO features.

Using this book, developers will learn the various changes in Joomla! 1.6 that affect the day to day routine of organizing, adding and editing articles. Additionally, this book will assist developers to understand the new extensions overhauled in Joomla! 1.6 and the new SEO features to enhance their site’s SEO, and to access Control Levels relevant to website administrators in need of fine grained user permissions control.

Packed with step-by-step instructions and illustrative screenshots, this book is ideal for existing Joomla! users, developers and designers, who wish to know about everything that’s new in Joomla! 1.6. The book is out now and available from Packt. To read more about it, please visit: https://www.packtpub.com/joomla-1-6-first-look/book

22 million. That’s an incredible number to achieve, but that’s not the only impressive number they’ve been able to boast about.

Screenshot taken from Joomlacode.org as of 3/24/2011 9:48AM MST

Here are some others:

• The number of extensions (essentially applications for Joomla) has grown nearly 20% in a little over 4 months.
• 2 months after the launch of Joomla 1.6, the new CMS has already been downloaded almost 1 million times
• Joomla.org reached 7.5 million visitors in February, representing a 25% growth in Web traffic over a 4 month period

Impressive stats indeed. Joomla currently powers about 2.7 % of all websites on the net and has seen huge growth since the release of 1.6.

What are you experiences with Joomla? Do you consider it the #1 choice for content management? We’d love to hear your experience and thoughts in the comments below.

• Moderate Priority – Core – SQL Injection / Interal Path Disclosure.
• Moderate Priority – Core – Path Disclosure.
• Moderate Priority – Core – XSS Vulnerabilities.
• Moderate Priority – Core – XSS Vulnerabilities.
• Low Priority – Core – Information Disclosure.
• Moderate Priority – Core – Redirect Vulnerabilities.
• Moderate Priority – Core – Information Disclosure.
• Low Priority – Core – Unauthorised Access.
• Moderate Priority – Core – CSRF Vulnerabilities.
• Moderate Priority – Core – DOS Vulnerabilities.
• Moderate Priority – Core – XSS Vulnerabilities.
• Moderate Priority – Core – CSRF Vulnerabilities.

Full release notes can be found here: http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5350-joomla-161-released.html

Frankly speaking I always thought that Joomla had a better Content Management interface than WordPress, it was just easier to find stuff with bigger sites in Joomla. The massive draw back was the imposed Information Architecture due to Joomla’s content hierarchy.

So I took the Joomla 1.6 out of its shiny zip folder, installed it on my local host and I was ready to see what this baby could do.

The Installation Process – 6/10

Very much the same as it has been for a while, no new twists and turns. I do like that you have a guided process that you can see how many stages to take. I wonder however, how it would be to ask users to simply click and confirm the deletion of the installation folder?

You can see that there are more developers behind Joomla than designers in that you are given a long list of server requirements that are either Yes or No, most will not know what these mean. I find the ‘optional’ FTP layer details a little confusing (when thinking as a newbie just installing a CMS for the first time). I personally would make as much of this as transparent as possible.

So onwards and upwards to the new front-end

Joomla 1.6 Default Template – 6/10

Starting from the top and working down, Joomla is ahead of the game already with the font size selection. This means that they have the backs of special need users, which I am totally in agreement with. Even this functionality being in the default theme gives developers something to reference when wanting to do similar accessibility functions for their template. Additionally the template sports a ‘skip links’ bar which helps screen readers get straight to the content on the page. Bravo Joomla.

The navigation bar is a grey gradient with clear text, a clear HTML structure and CSS hooks make this easy to play with. Again giving a good example to template developers.

I like the new banner, it gives a fresh and solid over all feel to the template. The layout then splits into a left sub nav and module area with the right being the main content. I was impressed with the new way of laying out the home page as before it got a little messy with 1 column latest articles being shown and then that going into a 2 by 2 or 2 by 3 column. Even explaining that in words sounds complicated so a new simple 3 column layout with clear headings and into text gives a clear feel.

Suitable Simplicity – 6.5/10

One thing I can see that has improved is that they have not turned on everything all at once. Before we had polls, RSS feeds, links and a whole plethora of functionality that is not used and cluttered the initial template. I think now that Joomla has become so popular people know what it can do, so now they can tone down things and let users do more discovering than disabling.

We have a new font ladies and gentle man, welcome on stage “font-family: ’Titillium Maps’, Arial; “, I think it works well and it is nice and clear.

The Ace Up Joomla’s Sleeve, Navigation – 6/10

The first left navigation we have is ‘About Joomla’, if you click on any of the links you see the sub-navigation system kicking in. The ability for custom menus has always been the Ace up Joomla’s sleeve, one which will surely be waiting for me in the admin area.

Attention to Detail, come on Joomla! – 4/10

When you click on ‘The Joomla! Community’ this is where an issue I have with Joomla really arises. Something that, in my opinion, really stops this wonderful CMS dominating the market and that is the attention to detail. On this page the links / buttons look terrible. They do not suit the rest of the template, no padding and looks like they are floating in the middle of nowhere. This is rife throughout Joomla which we will see as we start exploring some of the other pages.

My first trip was to the site map page, this must be for search engines as both the main area and the subsequent pages look blander than a Banana Milkshake with out the shake or the banana, they should call it a site dump not map. No headings or anything to say what page you are on e.g if you are looking at Articles, Categories or Web Links. Okay so I won`t be adding this functionality to my site.

Next up is the login screen. This whole process has been a massive fail for Joomla in my opinion. Again on this page there is nothing but two sorry looking boxes asking for a username and password. Granted the accessibility of the code is good with the use of the for=”" attribute but this page looks sadder than a hot dog with no mustard or ketchup. If memory serves this page is also not easy to edit and actually add some nice content like a header, an explanation of why you are here, what to do if you lose your details. I am hoping that somewhere in the backend is waiting a page for me to edit and if i`m lucky a way of adding more fields.

Sample sites, now we are talking, things look much better and I am given a real impression of what is possible with Joomla. The Australia Park, Fruit Site, links to extensions and templates give me a feel that Joomla is much more than this shell.

One thing I liked was the new tabbed widget, this appears on the Sample Sites page and gives us access to the interior pages of the sample sites directly. A nice touch and way of showing off those famous custom menus we have all heard about before WordPress 3.x came along and kinda made it a mute point.

Time To Get Our Hands Dirty in the Joomla Administration Section – 7/10

Smooth, the login screen has been given a little make over as well. I am liking the new blue that is appearing, I think someone has been colour scheming. There is no forgotten password link, so I hope you administrators have good memories. This may have been due to the previous versions being spammed but there is plenty of help online to help reset your password. So in we go.

The administration of Joomla has always been its strong point. The admin home is clean, simple and informative. Left we have some nice new icons sporting the latest in CMS actions. I can quickly add new article, category, manage my media or re-arrange my menu, all the things a site owner will do on a regular basis. Below we have settings and then template management on the last row. Something I have always liked is the right hand side giving quick info on your sites statistics, however I would put Popular Articles on the right according to the menu item rather than who last logged in.

Looking at the Popular Articles gives me a clear title, creation date and hits. This is missing from the default install of say WordPress yet it is so very handy!

Administration Profiles – 7/10

Starting on the menu we first hit the user profile of administrator, and I assume of whomever is logged in at that time. The profile is very customisable and I like how the language selection is very intrinsic to everything that Joomla does. I can set the language of both the front-end and back-end and there now seems to be some new admin templates available, ohh fancy!

Then we hit a boring issue with Joomla, this idea of having to save before we move onto something else. It was a bug bare of mine with when this was introduced in Photoshop as well. Why can`t I just leave the page if I have not done anything? Nope, I have to first save and then the menus get enabled. I am sure this stops a lot of issues but for the User Experience it is frustrating. Right now, I want to go to the next menu item under Site but I have to move to the opposite side of the screen to first save, then I can move on. Joomla community, any chance of changing this in the next version? Maybe a quick Ajax call as a user leaves the page?

Global Configuration – 6/10

I do like the way this screen has a nice tab/link system, however usability says that one should know where one is, and with this menu system you do not. A small issue as the responsiveness of the menu is slick and quick. The same settings are available and the whole rigmarole of the mod_rewrite and htaccess changes stare at me, reminding me of all the previous issues with older versions. I hoped this was smoother this time, and after testing it is. Another nice thing is that the Search Engine friendly URL is activated by default. Looking through the settings I really feel that this is a powerful system and nicely customiseable. The ability to put in all the ftp details, smtp definitely give the impression that previous issues have given birth to these settings to help people send emails that actually get through and upload files that reach their destination.

Do I have Permission – 7/10

Now we are talking! Drupal has always been famous for its permissions and WordPress it’s lack of. Joomla seems to have hit this one square on the head. The awaited changes in 1.6 were just this, the ability to assign permissions to groups of users. This is an immensely powerful function for large companies having multiple sections managing their corporate site. Or maybe you have an article type site with many authors, whatever your site the permissions settings seem flexible enough to make sure nobody is editing what they should not be.

Each of the user types are listed nicely, on clicking say Publisher, we can see very clearly they are not allowed to manage components for example. Something else I just noticed is the idea of inheritance. Now this is again a very useful tool as it stop me clicking endless settings to customise each user persona. Now I can filter down the admin rights to each type of user with a few clicks. Well played Joomla!

Now with a firm smile on my face I skip over to the user section and see that I can now create custom user types. This type of functionality is very handy for larger sites so I can see where Joomla is positioning itself. It would be ill advised to go for the small blog type market where WordPress dominates so they are going for the medium to large sites with Drupal lurking around the larger sites with a menacing look on it’s face. Lets see where all this user functionality takes Joomla. I would expect to see some nice tutorials on how to really use the new user rights customisability in company aimed tutorials e.g. “how to customise your Joomla site to manage multiple sections and company divisions”.

A quick look at User Groups shows an interesting example, Shop Suppliers. This does indeed feed the imagination. You are selling online and you simply want users to upload their products, now we have a User Persona for that very task. Joomla you are spoiling us!

Articles Under Control – 8/10

Adding a new article is peppered with the ability to control those permissions, it makes the page a little busy but works fine. One bug bare with adding articles has always been the pop-up HTML editor, why not a nice little tab system? I have to admit WordPress gets this right on the money. The popup appears, you change and then it re-loads the page with your changes, this seems to me a terribly inefficient way of doing it.

On the right we have a lot of lovely Joomla settings. It is however something that makes it a really powerful CMS. The article options tab is fantastic, you can really modify just about everything or leave it up to the global settings. So if you don`t want the author on this page, then he shall not be shown. If you leave the settings alone then the global settings take over. This allows you to change the settings for all articles in one place, which is found in the Article Manager. We are heading to the Article Manager now…

The Piece De Resistance of Joomla, Article Management – 8.5/10

For me the Article Manager is one of the best things about Joomla, you can search effectively, sort content and easily see your hierarchy. Publishing is a click away as is featuring an article making the Management part of Joomla’s CMS very effective. The best thing for me has to be the drop downs allowing you to show articles from a specific category, author, permission, type or state. A new little point is the alias appearing under the article title, this is useful if you want to know what URL will be shown on the front-end. If only WordPress had this!

Mrs. Category finally has some children! 8/10

Note: I am taking 4 points away because they should have done this a long time ago.

One massively limiting factor with pre 1.6 Joomla was the imposed Section > Category > Article structure. I don`t know about you but my sites are rarely that simple. The whole hierarchy was very limiting and confusing to explain. As we run courses on Joomla, a large portion was explaining this structure that was at the heart of managing your sites Information Architecture. Joomla 1.6 now enables you to assign child categories aka sub-categories. This means you can use any structure you want, that make sense. With the lovely manu system you an easily serve a page containing all the articles from a category giving you a much more flexible site. Lets say for example you have a e-commerce site that sells widgets, you will want to show certain categories, allowing users to drill down to Blue, Xtra Large, 240v Widgets that are on special offer; now you can.

No Frills Joomla Media Management – 6/10

The Media Manager remains pretty much the same, the only addition is the permissions settings. I have not been a massive fan of the way Joomla does this, however when your site starts getting full it really helps.

Whats on the Menu? – 7/10

The menu system of Joomla kept it high in the CMS choice awards for a while, with WordPress 3.0, it took a hit as they did it better, that is my opinion and I stand by it. A new feature, which is very useful, is the ability to see where the menu items are being used i.e. the “modules linked to the menu item” as this helps you visualise where the menu items will appear.

The Menu drop down gives you the ability to directly add to the that menu from the top main menu. I can see that some user testing / observing has brought this about because before it was 3 clicks away and something you do a lot as the site progresses. Listen to users, tick for Joomla.

Adding a menu got a lot easier too! Before you had to select the type and then go through all the details, now if you made a mistake or changed your mind you would have to go all the way back and start all over again. It was about 4 or 5 clicks before you were ready to add the menu item, now it is much more streamlined. Besides the type and the title the Joomla community have added a note field.

To the right we see a “Link Type Options” panel that does look very interesting. It allows you to put CSS hooks directly into the menu item, this can be really handy when you want to do something special. Further down we have the same options as before except at the end we have “Module Assignment for this Menu Item”. When assigning a module a nice popup window appears but the state of its contents is something to be ashamed of. The text sizes are different the and the actual assignment (at least for the default instal) is an endless list of seemingly incoherent menu items. I think this should have been tabbed better or organised in stages at least.

Users in Joomla Group Together for Security – 6/10

User groups are an exciting concept if you are running a corporate site and a good way of keeping your site secure. Create the group, give it permissions and add users to that group. This way you can control groups of users much more easily. You now add groups directly from the top menu or within the User Management section.

When adding a section I noticed a common thread “Save and Add New”, this is a great step forward literally with everything you can now do. It feels like everything is now geared to getting things done not just move stuff around. I likey!

Manage My Extensions – 3/10

What CMS would be a CMS without add-ons? Joomla certainly has it’s fair share, if not the most out of the top open source systems (if anyone has figures on this I would love to hear from you). Again this is a tedious and manual way of adding things to an online system. You must first find the extension, download it, upload it, enable it and play with it. Is it me or does that seem a long process, especially if you are simply wanting to try out an extension before you put it on the main / live site? Sorry Joomla but WordPress has this down and you are behind, please oh please make it so we can connect to the main extensions section of your site and install and activate? I have the feeling that due to the sheer amount of rubbish extensions polluting the Joomla community, this is going to be hard to achieve.

Note: I have not heard of any changes to the upgrade / update process, if it is the same, then -10 points straight away.

Do You Spreken? – 7/10

No news here except Joomla has done a good job of making language an intrinsic part of the core. The language files are easy to install and use and JoomFish is a great component that any self respecting multi-lingual site should have installed.

Conclusion about Joomla 1.6

Joomla is still a powerful CMS, the core is nice and works well but the issue I have always had is with the various plug-ins. I just don`t feel they are written to the same quality of say WordPress or Drupal. Some plug-ins really have a life of their own and finding the code that they spit out is like finding a needle in a giant haystack after 6 pints of Stella i.e. hard! As a designer I take great pleasure in making themes for Joomla, it is well developed and I would love to hear from Joomla Developers on how the new 1.6 is like to programme with.

Overall score : 7/10

Overall the new 1.6 version is a step in the right direction. The UI is much smoother, the new permissions are fantastically powerful, the multi-level categories give you freedom of content organisation and it is still a CMS that works with theme designers and developers.

About the Author

Carl is founder of for Web Courses Bangkok - www.webcoursesbangkok.com , the new leader in International Standards Based Web Design Courses in Thailand. When he is not running WCB he is a consultant for various organisations including the United Nations. You can also follow him at @webcoursesbkk.

Installation hasn’t changed and is the same number of steps so we won’t cover this during our review. One thing that would be nice to see in future versions and that we would have liked to see in this release would be the automatic removal of the /installation directory at the end of the install. Right now, the installer expects the user to delete this when removing it automatically would make things slightly more convenient.  This isn’t a major issue at all, just a simple nice to have that would be good to see in future releases.

The default theme that has been present for years in Joomla releases has been changed to a much plainer one:

I couldn’t find any mention as to why this was changed in the release notes but it has been. I personally welcome the change, it’s nice to see something different for a change. Whether you think it’s actually better or not is up to you.

The administration interface has a slightly newer feel to it and some minor changes visually:

When compared to 1.5, you can see there have been some changes to the default icons such as the addition of the extension manager and a new Edit Profile icon. For comparison purposes, here’s a screenshot of the 1.5 admin interface:

Once of the most touted new features to this release is the addition of much needed ACL functionality. As you add new articles, you’ll notice the new section below the editor:

It’s great to see this level of customization has been added and it puts Joomla in a much better position to contend with some of the other options (both commercial and open source) that are on the market today.

The settings are very straight forward and easy to configure and most users should find their comfort level fairly quickly with regards to setting them up.

Users do not have to configure these individually, however. In the Article Manager, when clicking on the Options button at the top of the screen, you can set defaults for all articles as well:

There is also a new button that allows editors to save their article and immediately start a new one. A simple addition but a welcome, time saving one.

ACL can also be managed on a per category level, per module and also on individual media itself so there’s definitely a solid level of granularity to the controls users now have.

Thankfully, the development team has seen fit to get rid of the Sections altogether. This is a very welcome change and has been a major annoyance (in my opinion) for a number of years. No longer is this an issue.

Moving on to the menu management module, another new addition has been made available. Users can now see which modules are linked to each specific menu. This is a very useful addition and seems to be on mark with the development teams goals for this release which include improving usability and making the system easier to use:

User management also shows a few new additions. Namely, the ACL functionality is present (obviously) and there is also a new function to set a default backend template style. This is a handy addition and allows the designer/developer the additional ability to further customize the experience on a per user basis.

Access levels and groups are a new addition as well and can be found under the new user menu:

As you can see, there is also the ability to mass mail users from within the backend. This is especially handy and works like a charm:

Under the components menu, there is a new Redirect option which allows administrators to configure 404 redirects on a per item basis or in bulk. No more 404 pages for users who follow an old link that has changed.

Moving to the management of extensions, there is now the ability to update extensions and find updates.

For more info on this functionality, here’s a video showcasing the new capability:

Developers are also available to distribute multiple modules in a single zip file to easy installation. This is a great time saver for the administrator of the system.

From a template point of view, all core output files are written in XHTML 1.0 Strict. HTML 5 is also supported in Joomla! 1.6 which brings Joomla up to date with current standards. Furthering that, you can easily create minor template variations, which can then be assigned to specific pages on the website.

Overall, I have to say that the Joomla! development team have done an outstanding job improving the system with this release. Joomla 1.6 is a significant improvement and brings with it functionality that lifts it to a new level of competitiveness with commercial competitors.

There is no doubt that the developers were focused on improving usability and ease of use. Their commitment to do so is very evident and I strongly recommend Joomla! as a viable alternative to those looking for a powerful content management solution.

The Joomla! development team should pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

I’ve no doubt there are additional changes that I didn’t catch. Share your experiences in the comments.

Grab your copy from http://www.joomla.org

“With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool to develop a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. “This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year.”

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 22 million times). It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and many more.

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

·    New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.

·    Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.

·    One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.

·      Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

·      Multi-language Functionality – Allows site builders to implement a multi-language site.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This makes it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing.

“The current Joomla Platform provides developers with the tools they need to rapidly build the Web of the future,” said Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla production leadership team. “Although 1.6 is being released today, the Joomla production team is not resting on its laurels. We’re hard at work developing even more powerful Joomla features for the future, such as new search capabilities and new ways to leverage website content.”

Visit http://www.joomla.org to download Joomla 1.6 today.

About Joomla!

Joomla is the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system). With 2.5 percent of the web running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small and medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create and build a variety of websites and web-enabled applications. Due to its power and elegance, it can be used by the most inexperienced user to the most seasoned web developer. Since its inception in 2005, Joomla has been 100 percent community owned and operated, and its software has been downloaded more than 22 million times. For more information, visit www.joomla.org.