Joomla 1.6 to be released in June

Written by Erik Sunday, 31 May 2009 08:14

There are now rumours that the new Joomla 1.6 will be released in June 2009. These are exciting times because the new version of Joomla holds a lot of new improvements compared to Joomla 1.5. Joomla is currently at version 1.5.10 but the new 1.6 will soon be released.

Amongst some of the things improved is the com_contact, with a lot of help from Phil Taylor (yes, the same Phil who makes all those beautiful extensions)

The date would probably change but an alpha release of Joomla 1.6 seems to be scheduled for June 26. So keep an eye open for this new version and be sure to upgrade all your Joomla installs to the newest and safest version.

Here is a "short" list of the most important updates to Joomla:

Nested categories
Access Control (ACL)
Comments as standard component
Improved frontend editing
Captcha as standard
Improved layouts
Extensions updater

Other features coming in Joomla 1.6

Implement a new JForm library package [complete].
Implement a simple way of providing translation in JavaScript [complete].
Implement new controller dispatchers for more robust request routing [complete].
Implement and standardise several new event triggers [in progress].
Implement a JContent class that will be used by content plug-ins and views [in progress].
Upgrade to Mootools 1.2 [in progress].
Menu manager re-work -- added since it's broken in 1.6 [in progress].
Implement queued redirects (allows you to, for example, return to the previous page you were on after you edit something).
Refactor parameters and make them more extensible (for example, plugins could allow you to add additional custom parameters to articles).
Finish MVC-ing the Administrator components (we need lots of help here).
Implement systems whereby external authentication systems, such as LDAP, can map to our new Joomla user groups.
Re-implement the ability to select multiple categories for some views in com_content (was in 1.0, got dropped in 1.5).
Implement a database driven installation log.
Refactor JError.
Examine the PDF generation system in detail and see if we can make it work properly (otherwise we will look at dropping it if we can't make it work well).
Localise the Invalid Token messages.
Drop the Polls component because the quality of that extension is pretty bad and there are much better third-part alternatives available.
Convert all layouts to semantic, XHTML Strict.
Convert of ini-based "params" fields to use JSON instead of INI format (huge technical and performance improvements). Note, the language files will remain in INI format.