Joomla! 1.6 Beta released

The Joomla! developers have released a beta of version 1.6 of their open source content management system (CMS). Joomla! is a widely used and easily deployed PHP based CMS, which can be used for publishing anything from personal home pages to corporate web sites or intranets. One of it's strengths is the wide range of languages available, over sixty in Joomla! 1.5, ranging from Afrikaans to Vietnamese, which has allowed it to be adopted in non-english speaking countries and communities. Among the users of Joomla! are, for example, Linux.com and the Palm webOS developer community.

Joomla! 1.6 features a new hierarchical access control system, one-click extension updates and semantic XHTML layouts. The new access control system will give site administrators finer grained control over who can view and manage content within the CMS; this granular control is also available to developers of Joomla! extensions. The one-click extension updates are designed to simplify the process of installing enhancements and updates to those enhancements and, it is hoped, help keep Joomla! sites more secure. There are many other changes in Joomla! 1.6, while the whats new page is somewhat sparse, the previous alpha 2 announcement offers more detail.

Open Source Matters (OSM) President Ryan Ozimek said, “The release of Joomla! 1.6 will raise the bar of success for our community’s users, and enable our developer community to build even more exciting and compelling solutions,” adding that the new features and capabilities will "usher in a new set of tools that open doors for more effective online engagements."

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the release can be found in the release announcement. Joomla! 1.6 Beta 1 is available to download from the project's web site and is released under the GNU General Public License. The latest stable release of Joomla! is version 1.5.17 from the 27rd of April, 2010. The Joomla! Project is sponsored by Open Source Matters, Inc., a non-profit organisation.

See also:

• Microsoft contributing to Joomla! CMS, a report from The H.

(crve)