Joomlashack professional and free Joomla templates

The steady march to Joomla 1.6 picked up further steam recently with the release of the project's second alpha release.

Joomla 1.6 Alpha 2 became available last week, and shows the development team is making great strides toward a next generation Joomla.

Front and center in this new release is the long-awaited Access Control Level feature, or ACL. A first release of the "nested categories" and a new backend template made it in the second alpha as well.

With Joomla 1.6 getting closer to a beta release (anticipated sometime in the next few months), the Joomla leadership team is hosting the first-ever Joomla Developer Conference in early December.

When will we see Joomla 1.6 Beta? After a second Joomla 1.6 alpha release, says the Production Leadership Team.

Joomla 1.6 promises to provide several powerful new features to our favorite CMS. One new feature in particular is slowing down the development of a beta release of 1.6, but the wait appears quite worth it.

Continuing our efforts to get Joomla's Summer of Code projects lots of attention, here's the third in our Youtube clips of recent GSOC webinars.

Naveen Gavini spent his summer tackling a HUGE opportunity for Joomla 1.6: multi-site management. As Naveen writes, "Did you ever wish you could set up multiple Joomla! sites that share all or part of a single database?" Perhaps soon you will!

View our 5 minute Youtube clip, or watch the entire 25 minute presentation.

Continuing our efforts to get Joomla's Summer of Code projects lots of attention, here's the next in our Youtube clips of recent GSOC webinars.

Next up is a clip from Andrea Tarr's "Accessible Administrator Template for Joomla 1.6" video from last week. We blogged recently about Andrea's efforts to make the Joomla 1.6 backend easier to use and more intuitive, and her presentation dives right in.

View our 5 minute Youtube clip, or watch the entire 20 minute presentation.

We've blogged about the outstanding students who used their Google Summer of Code stipend to spend time improving Joomla. With the official GSOC over, the students are now reporting back to the community about their successful projects. Joomla 1.6 is going to benefit enormously from their efforts!

This past week brought live webinars about several of the projects, including a VERY exciting effort by Ankit Ahuja to bring advanced front end editing to Joomla.

Watch a 5 minute clip of the longer presentation "Advanced Front End Editing for Joomla" right here!

The 17 Joomla "summer of code" projects sponsored by Google officially concluded today. So what did the Joomlaverse gain?

By all accounts, a ton of useful code and exciting features that will further improve of beloved Joomla!

For the past five summers, Google has sponsored "a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects." The Joomla Project has benefited from the program since 2007.

This summer, 17 projects from six continents provided valuable code and experimental ideas to Joomla.

Here are some highlights from two projects of special interest to Joomlashack.

Who knew there was so much interest in Joomla 1.6 already? Last week Joomlashack re-posted a video by Joomla 1.6 Project Lead Andrew Eddie that has taken on a life of its own, both in our own blog comments, the Twittersphere, and on Eddie's own blog, theartofjoomla.com.

Attention Joomlaheads: Change ahead with Joomla 1.6 coming on quickly. (A beta release is expected in early August.)

Joomla 1.6 Project Lead Andrew Eddie spent some time this week at the Brisbane Joomla User Group talking about Joomla 1.6. His presentation about Joomla's future is a "must watch" for those of us who make our living with Joomla products and services.

Below you'll find a 52 minute video of Eddie's presentation, titled "Joomla 1.6- Lifting the Lid." Great thanks to Andrew Smith for filming, editing, and posting this insightful bit of footage!

Joomlashack is always excited to keep on top of the latest Joomla 1.6 news on our blog. Last week big news was announced by the volunteer developers over at the Joomla Project: the next generation of Joomla is expected to be released very soon, or in the words of Development Coordinator Andrew Eddie, "on or about 22 June, 2009."

Eddie blogged last week about some cool new features of Joomla 1.6, and posted some annotated screenshots of the revamped Menu Manager. From what we can gather through the various channels and sources, Joomla 1.6 is expected to have lots of new functionality and many usability improvements.

And what about Joomla 1.5?

Joomla Project coordinator Wilco Jansen recently updated the Joomlaverse about the status of Joomla 1.6, the next version of Joomla. Joomla 1.6 is expected later in 2009, but is currently in pre-alpha stage.