The Joomla team announced that they had released the Joomla 1.6 public BETA on the 17th of May and we have just downloaded it to start investigating what will be on offer on the new version!
1.6 is the first major release since Joomla 1.5 came out back in January 2008 and is more of an evolution of 1.5 rather than a revolution, with several important key features being added to the system in addition to a raft of functional and interface improvements. The two main new features are :
1. Unlimited section/categories
Actually just unlimited categories, sections are gone altogether. One of the limitations of Joomla 1.5 was that it only allowed for two levels of categorisation of content, Sections and Categories, and although you could have as many of those as you wished you couldn’t go any further than those two basic levels unless you installed one of several extensions which allowed for this. Now unlimited categories are part of the 1.6 core which allows for far greater flexibilty and organisation of content.
2. ACL (Access Control List)
This is another important addition in Joomla 1.6. Again, although 1.5 allowed for restricting access to pages, modules and menu items we were restricted to a small set of core levels of access. Althoguh we could set content to be only for registered users we couldn’t define different types of registered users – ie if you wanted Gold level access which let people view all articles and Silver level access which only allowed access to some of those articles.
As with the sections and categories, thanks to the wonderful Joomla community there were several extensions which could be added onto Joomla 1.5 which would allow for a greater level of control (such as the amazing OSE Access Control which we used on several sites), however ACL is now part of the core.
So what does this mean? It means that you can set up an unlimited number of access groups for use on your site and define exactly what each of them can do on a per-item basis. For example if you had a school website you could allow certain users to only update pages for their department and other users to update several department’s pages, or if you are a charity organisation you can allow project workers access to certain parts and site admins to all parts. The potential is huge.
At this stage the release is still a BETA so is not quite ready for use on production/live sites, however it shouldn’t take too long for the first proper release to come out. We will continue to investigate and test this new version in advance of its official release so that we can be sure to be amongst the first to be offering Joomla 1.6 websites to all of our clients!