Joomla 1.6 Release

With the recent release of Joomla version 1.6 many designers are wondering how that effects the sites they offer their clients.  There majority of the features are focused on cleaning up the administrator interface and will will highlight a few of the major ones below.

The first change that most will notice is the new admin theme.  The updated theme and menu structure will help site administrators more easily navigate their CMS.  The functionality updates, while not huge, are very well supported by the usability updates.  Overall, site admins should fine their way around the CMS more quickly and easily then before.  

The most touted change was the inclusion of a more robust user management system.  The new ACL (access control list) in Joomla 1.6 allows you to specify which user groups can access which parts of the site.  Now there are also, system compliant ways for adding custom user groups and specifying their access rights. 

Of all the features released our favorite is the change made to the module manager.  Now site admins can assign modules to all pages except specified ones.  In the past it was difficult to assign modules to pages that were dynamically generated by custom components, but now this eliminates that issue.

All and all, this is a great update that we are excited to start building on.  The admin panel changes should make Joomla a much more enjoyable system for users to manage their content with. 

As a warning note - there are some significant function depreciations as well as database structure changes in the new version so be careful about making the upgrade on any site with custom components or modules.  Some of the core changes could stop these add-ons from functioning.

Take a look at the info graphic or head on over to Joomla.org to try a demo of the new version.