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May 25th, 2010 
Joomla! 1.6 fistst Beta has just been published, and for those of us who have been waiting for quite a long time, this is very good news. This new version adds a whole lot of new features and enhancements to the previous Joomla! version, the 1.5 branch.
The installation process is quite similar to the one we have get used to, with the difference that we are able to change user name at the end. This way the super administrator can be something different to the classic “admin”. Sure we could change that later, but this is a little nice feature, like many others in Joomla! 1.6, that will make our life a bit easier. But, in my opinion, this will make sites more secure, as non-experienced Joomla! users won’t be always selecting “admin” as their user name.
Once we get to the frontend, we will see a new template, this was something expected, but as many sites use the basic template, with some minor modifications, it’s a good think to have more options to choose from. The template is very nice, with good details, but easy to the eye, sure most people will like it.
But it’s on the administrator part of our Joomla! site where most surprises are waiting for us. The theme has also changed, for better in my opinion, though not so much that previous users will have difficulties using it. As always, it remains useful, with all main options in place for ease of use.
In the site menu, global configuration, we will find some tiny additions, for example, in the site tab we will be able to define content rights for our site. Also we have the possibility to add the site name to our page’s title. This is a task that before required the use of a plugin, this time we can make use of it without installing anything.
The system tab remains mainly the same, as the server tab does, but then we have a new tab, the permissions one. It’s in this tab where we will be able to define global permissions for groups, like site login, admin login, manage, create, edit. This gives us more power than in previous Joomla! versions, and it’s something many of us found missing.
We can add more groups under the users menu, here we can define new users, groups and access levels. Note that in this Joomla! version, users can belong to more than one group, giving us even more flexibility.
The menu manager has also suffered a great remodelation, and in my humble opinion, it’s much, much easier to use. Next we find the articles part, and here will note the disappearance of the sections. Now, we only have categories, but much more powerful than before, as we can nest them as many as we want. No more three level limitations, a limitation most Joomla! users found annoying. Note also that articles can now receive all the permissions we talked about just momments before. And also, important, language, we can define the language of articles.
In the components section of this new Joomla! version, we will find some old ones, like the banners, contact, search, weblinks and so on. But also a redirect one, that will enable us to define redirect urls, possibilities for this module are huge. I’m sure you will find it very useful.
But the extensions menu will bring some new features to us, like update extensions, and discover extensions. This seems not to work at the momment, but it remembers me to the install feature of other software, like Magento or similar.
And finally for this small approach, we now find in the templates menu that we now have template styles, so one template can have more than one style, nice! for a developer, and designer, just as me, this opens to many, many possibilities. And Joomla! template market is just rising and rising, adding more options to templates can only enhance that.
Sure there many other features under the hood, but I’m sure the ones we have commented here will be of much help for all developers out there. Now, why don’t you take a look to the new Joomla! version?
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