With the second alpha in the works, Joomla! 1.6 appears to be getting that much closer to release. What are your expectations for 1.6?
Over the years, there have been a number of claims, whether substantiated or not, that Joomla! has suffered from security issues and/or is overly complicated for beginners. How do you feel about this upcoming release? Do you think some of these issues will be addressed? Do you foresee a change on the horizon or just another basic update without any significant impact?
We want to provide as much feedback as possible to the Joomla! developers to help them make this the best release yet, so let’s start tossing out ideas and suggestions.
October 28, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Most of us will be very, VERY happy if the Access Control is improved.
October 28, 2009 at 2:12 pm
How so? What specifically are you hoping to see an improvement on?
October 28, 2009 at 3:11 pm
They definitely have to improve security as well. I have moved over to Drupal and find it more secure and you cant go wrong with CCK and Views. This is the main thing that Joomla lacks. Yes, i know there are plugins that can provide those functions, but i find them quite buggy.All in all i think Joomla is a great CMS, but i think it comes in second to Drupal.
October 28, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Unless Joomla changes drastically with this upgrade I doubt I’ll ever go back to using it. Too many security issues, and its bloated.
October 29, 2009 at 8:48 am
OK, there are a lot of things to do to ensure the security of a Joomla site and this is not for the fainthearted but security IMO is not an issue if you’re prepared to a) learn, b) pay for good web hosting and c) stay informed of updates and issues.
As for Drupal being “better” or “best” it would be interesting to know under what context this is so. I’ve just launched a year-long Joomla 1 > 1.5 upgrade of a 5000+ page quality commercial website with a core Joomla designer & developer onboard. A Drupal development team promised the same upgrade but Joomla 1 > Drupal in just 4 weeks! This implies any of 3 things: 1) They lied 2) They underestimated the work 3) Drupal really is easier to develop on and migrate to by a factor of more than 10.
I suspect the workload of the project was grossly underestimated with a tiny dash of the other ingredients in there for good measure.
But to Joomla 1.6: ACL is widely anticipated as being a blessing to many webmasters. Nested categories should now be supported thankfully – that’s one gross limitation out of the way. The codebase is apparently 50% less even with added functions and Mootools 1.2 is finally integrated – both of these should help reduce concerns over accusations of Joomla being “bloaty”.
I would prefer to have seen a jQuery option in there as opposed to/as well as Mootools and I hope that the next ver of Mootools doesn’t strand J1.6.
In addition, there’s no mention of SEO, yet again. Joomla still believes it is SEF enough but the SEO veterans are still left without the full array of boxes checked. Now, I could be wrong about this and SEO has been improved but not mentioned, but Joomla has never boasted about its core SEF capabilities and seems to be happy to ignore this in favour of “more important” issues.
All that said, I look forward to Joomla 1.6 more than I look forward to WordPress 2.9 but I will still happily use both and for very different reasons.
November 2, 2009 at 4:17 am
Joomla does not have security problems that are due to flaws in Joomla itself.
I expect 1.6 will move Joomla a little closer to clarifying itself as a rapid, all-purpose web development framework that is far easier to learn and use than the strongest alternatives.
Joomla 1.6 addresses one major core deficiency: the ACL. The remaining major deficiencies are interrelated and are addressed by the suite of extensions developed by Andrew Eddie et al at Jxtended and TheArtofJoomla.
In the future after 1.6 Joomla’s content manager component needs to be deprecated and made unpluggable. There needs to be a node-based content manager with custom content types and layouts plus category multimapping. Currently there are many extensions that can do some of these things but not all of them, or not very well. Search is another poor core function in Joomla related to content management functions.
Other areas for improvement:
Joomla’s “SEF” URL aliasing is adequate but not great. Drupal and WordPress are superior in that area. Joomla’s UI is an entry barrier but passable. AJAX all over it would be nice.
Wordpress is the mark for its hosted service, centralized and automated one-click extension updates, plus basic SEO features like tagging integrated with the publishing UI. Drupal 7 and Drupal Gardens may leave Joomla lagging at a distant third in all these categories. Apart from the AJAX and the way images/media are handled, WP’s UI is not as great as it is cracked up to be, especially with a lot of plugins.