The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 12 . (amazing!)

We have tested it out and must say this new release is coming along nicely. It should not be long before this moves on to it’s first stable release. We love the Joomla CMS project. The software is well written modular and completely open source. All of this of course means that companies like (Computer Geek Services) us can develop custom solutions for this CMS for our clients. We love making our clients happy with intelligent and clean solutions that will make their business even more streamlined and automated.

So why are we so excited about the new release of Joomla 1.6? Well we have written many an application (Recruitment center modules, Social network mods, Ecommerce plugins) for this software. We know it like an old friend from university! We have also written complete templates and based whole websites on this CMS software. Infact we would go as far to say there is not much we can’t do when it comes to Joomla!

Never used Joomla?

The Joomla Project, a free, award-winning PHP-based content management system that enables users to build websites and powerful online applications, today announced the beta release of Joomla 1.6. Designed to offer enhanced site control and a more polished user experience, Joomla 1.6 will deliver a variety of new tools to improve website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software.

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 16 million times). It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, IHOP, Harvard University, the Baltimore Police Department, Linux.com, Smart Car of America, The Guggenheim Museum, and many more.

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

New Access Control System – Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.
Unlimited Depth Organizational Model – Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.
One-Click Extension Updates – Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.
Semantic XHTML Layouts – Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This will make it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing.

“With the release of 1.6, The Joomla Project is transitioning the development process to a more iterative, time-based release cycle,” said Louis Landry, a lead developer and community member of The Joomla Project. “This new approach will help streamline the production of new code and better ensure timely releases around product updates. I’m very excited about the beta release and look forward to working with the entire community as we continue to refine the system.”

Well we can not wait to be developing for the new system!

Speak soon,

Matt – CGS & GGS Digital – Web Engineers.