People interested in the content management systems (CMS) industry are waiting for a big update to Joomla!, one of the most popular CMS in the world. Sometime in the near future, it will be moving from its current 1.5 version to a new and improved Joomla! 1.6.
Although that seems like a small increment in the version number, in fact there are some very important changes. Everyone currently using Joomla, or evaluating competing content management systems, will have to take notice.
Joomla 1.6 Features
Under the hood, Joomla 1.6 is going to do some exciting things to the programming framework and the database schemas... but most people in the Joomla! universe are Authors, Editors, Managers, and Administrators. What are they going to see? It's all about 2 main features:
Flexible Content Categories
There are some Joomla! users who live very comfortably in the Sections/Categories simple 2-level categorization of content. But frankly, we have ended up recommending another CMS like Drupal to some clients because Joomla's rigid categorization just could not handle their needs.
But, now in 1.6, Joomla is getting rid of Sections all together. There will be just Categories, and the Administrator can create and nest multiple levels of categories together to whatever depth and complexity they need.
Access Control Lists
In the same way that the rigid content categorization limited Joomla! in the past, many people were frustrated by the simple securty system. Users could only belong to 1 of 6 user groups, and there was no control over what the groups could do. For example, it was impossible to give a user the ability to create articles, but not to edit existing ones.
Joomla 1.6 will bring us the ability to create our own user groups, and assign users to one or more of them. Each group can have a seperate set of granular permissions and rules associated with it, and users will pick up the aggregate of all of their groups.
Upgrading to Joomla 1.6
The upgrade process from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 1.6 is still an unknown quantity. We do know that there are some significant changes to the database and importyant parts of the framework.If you're still on Joomla 1.0, its an even further distance to travel. In fact, you've probably already looked into "upgrading" to 1.5, and realized that no such thing exists. Moving to Joomla 1.6 would be a significant change that you will want to carefully plan.
However, there are some immediate barriers to upgrading that everyone should consider:
Joomla 1.6 has strict system requirements
If you'd like to consider upgrading to Joomla 1.6, your server must have:
- PHP 5.2+
- MySQL 5.0.4+
There is no circumventing these requirements, so check with your server and determine if it already complies, or you can upgrade those system to meet the above.
Joomla 1.6 does not have a legacy mode
For those of you with current Joomla 1.5 CMS websites, log into the administrator panel, go to Extensions -> Plugin Manager and find the plugin "System - Legacy" Is that enabled? You'll have to figure out why and get rid of the extension or module or plugin which relies on it.
WIth Joomla 1.6, you will have to abandon all code from the 1.0 era. Right now there are a lot of websites which continue to leverage those older extensions. But if you want to move forward, you'll have give them up for a more recent extension that helps you accomplish the same goal.
Joomla 1.6 Timeline
Joomla! is an open-source project that relies heavily on volunteers and the community. They don't have guaranteed release dates. However, in June of 2009 they released an Alpha version of the software. Their intent is go into a timeboxed development cycle with at most 4 iterations to get to Beta.
The result of that is that it seems likely that we will have a Release Candidate by approximately Christmas of 2009.
F.H. Black & Company's Joomla 1.6 Services
FHB provides CMS consulting to our clients, including Joomla! consulting. We've been evaluating the progress of Joomla 1.6 and are excited to be able to offer it to our clients as soon as it is stable and ready for live use.
We have offices in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and in the Vancouver, British Columbia areas, and service clients throughout Western Canada.
We can provide assistance:
- Doing an initial needs assessment
- Selecting the right CMS for your organization
- Implementing the basic CMS system
- Styling and templating the website for your personal look and feel
- Research and Selection of Extensions to the CMS
- Custom development of extensions and integration with other systems
- Ongoing maintenance and support