Joomla looks back and ahead to 1.6
Joomla.org recently celebrated the 1st birthday of the stable release for Joomla 1.5, and used the milestone to provide both a "state of union" look back, as well as as a look ahead to the next evolutionary step of the Joomla revolution: Joomla 1.6.
Since the launch of a stable 1.5 last January 2008, Joomla.org boasted these impressive stats:
- 8 million downloads of Joomla 1.5
- 5,000 extensions in the directory and most Joomla 1.5 native
- over 1.5 million posts from almost 250,000 users in the Joomla.org forums
- 20 million unique visitors to the family of Joomla sites
As is customary in a "state of the union" speech, Joomla.org declares that "the state of Joomla is strong." These numbers certainly are impressive!
As for the look ahead to Joomla 1.6, Joomla Development Coordinator Andrew Eddie blogs that the new version will include a much-wanted feature: Access Control System, which he describes as:
lock groups of users down to access particular functions, like managing each extension, managing menus, installing a particular type of extension, etc;
lock groups of users to be able to add, edit or remove content in particular categories (in other words, you will be able to define your own variants for existing groups like Author, Editor and Publisher);
lock groups or users down to be able to view content in new access levels that you define (for example, you could create a Staff group and a Staff access level so that your Staff users can see content restricted to their group).
ACL will be a huge improvement for Joomla, and will do much to help our favorite CMS leapfrog Drupal and others to become the most popular open source CMS on the planet. (That's our hope, if not a prediction.)
Read more from Andrew's post about where Joomla 1.6 is headed- and stay tuned to Joomlashack's blog for our take on Joomla 1.6 as it comes to the forefront in 2009.
The next generation of Joomla is coming. Keep on top of the latest news for Joomla 1.6
