Yesterday, the Joomla Development team announced the release of Joomla 1.6 RC1. This is exciting news for the Joomla community, and a GREAT Christmas present. What does this mean to you? Should you upgrade or wait?
Joomla 1.6 is a MAJOR upgrade of Joomla. There are three main features added to this realease…and they are BIG:
- Expanded Access Control System – this means you can now assign very specific access privileges. In Joomla 1.5, you could assign a user as a regular user, a registered users, an author, an editor, and admin, or a super admin. With Joomla 1.6, you can still assign the same user roles, but you can restrict them to certain areas of the site. For example, if you want a user to have the right to create and publish new articles on your site, but only in a specific category, you can do this. In fact, you can create a group with these privileges and then any user you assign to this group will have these same privileges.
- Nested Categories – In Joomla 1.5, you could not nest categories. Instead, you created Sections and then put categories inside them. But you were restricted to this model. Now, you can put a category inside a category, inside a category, etc. This feature will make organizing content on Joomla much easier
- Standardize the way extensions are built – What this means is that Joomla components, extensions, modules, and plugins will be built in a consitentant way to ensure that they work within the Joomla framework and follow Joomla development standards.
- Pure CSS Layout for the Core Joomla Components – In Joomla 1.5, there were still some parts of Joomla that used tables for layout. Using tables for layout is an outdated and cumbersome method for writing html code and makes it difficult to develop and modify, and it makes it difficult for search engines to read your content. Joomla 1.6 has pure CSS layout for all core components.