Exactly one year ago, Joomla! 1.0 was released. Today, Joomla!
releases the next generation framework built from the ground up. Joomla! 1.5 beta
delivers more simplicity for the user and much more power for
developers. The innovation and skill of our development team is
clearly setting higher and higher standards.
But before we get
into reams of detail about just how good Joomla! 1.5 beta is, remember
this is a beta and is not yet ready for use on a production website.
We need the community to roll up its sleeves and seek out bugs (and
feed this back to the development working group), before we enter the
release candidate phase.
Joomla! 1.5 beta marks the most
significant watershed in Joomla's history. This effort represents a
complete refactoring of the Joomla! codebase and leverages a new API
that allows developers to deliver more robust and innovative
applications than ever before. Joomla! 1.5 means freedom of choice:
you choose how it operates, you choose how it integrates, you choose
what the output is ... you choose how users are authenticated. For
both the user and the developer, Joomla! 1.5 beta is a simplified yet
more powerful system, and from the developer's perspective, provides
them with the freedom and flexibilty to build anything they want.
Lead developer Johan Janssens said 12 October is a giant step for the
Joomlasphere! "Open source projects are delivering incredible power
and features to end users — we've taken things a step further by
building an opportunity for unlimited extendibility for developers," he
said. "Once developers get to see how easily 1.5 can leverage their
own ideas as plugins, they will certainly be a big part of continuing
Joomla's incredible growth. You only need to take a look at the
Joomlasphere to understand how amazing the future can be."
Here are some basic facts about the Joomlasphere:
- More
than 60,000 registered users on the Official Joomla! community site
forum and more on the many international community sites.
- 1168 Projects on the Joomla! Forge (forge.joomla.org). All for open source addons by third party developers.
- 890+ extensions for Joomla! registered on the Extension site (extensions.joomla.org)
- Joomla.org exceeds 2 TB of traffic per month!
- Alexa report [October 2006]: Joomla.org at #492 of top 500 busiest websites in the world.
- Community forums, over half a million posts, and 60,000 activated users. Growing at over 1200 posts per day and 150 new partcipants each day!
Joomla! has been on the 'radar' of many centres of influence for some time. That
Joomla!'s
popularity continues to increase is evident from the size of its user
and development community. "Joomla! provides functionality that is
recognised by industry pundits and commercial software vendors," Johan
said. Joomla! continues to focus on bringing simplicity to content
management and allows anyone to quickly deploy a content management
system that satisfies the needs of general brochure websites to large
online communities. We've seen hundreds of businesses use Joomla! for
both public, private, non-profit and open source projects so we'll
continue to expand the platform with features that satisfy our
community. We could easily be the most successful content management
offer in 2007, and with the availability of our new application
framework, we hope to inspire more developers to adopt and build
applications that satisfy both open source and commercial needs."
As with previous releases, Joomla! 1.5 will provide a unified and
easy-to-use framework for delivering content for websites of all kinds.
To support the changing nature of the Internet and emerging web
technologies, Joomla! required substantial restructuring of its core
functionality and we also used this effort to simplify many challenges
within the current user interface.
In coming weeks, there will be new and expanded
developer blogs, based on feedback from the community about the beta. Keep an eye on the
developer portal to stay up to speed with suggestions, fixes and progress, as we move towards the release candidate.
Development Working Group coordinator Wilco Jansen said the rollout of
the beta release was supported by all the workgroups putting in long
hours. "Everybody put in an incredible effort — all the working groups
got stuck into 'making good things happen' and they should be proud of
their contribution," he said. Moreover, many community members were
making significant donations of time and knowledge to make 1.5 beta
happen today."
What can people expect from the beta? "The
most important thing to realise is as good as this release is, this is
not a stable release and should not be used for production purposes.
Importantly, the beta release provides third party developers with the
basis to test their extensions, and equally importantly, it is now time
for the community to feedback bugs or issues as they find them. Please
don't ask for functionality that is not included ... test the beta
thoroughly and communicate your experiences so we can make the release
candidate version the best Joomla! ever."
Joomla! 1.5 beta
represents a massive coding effort. Congratulations to all the coders,
planners, document writers, and designers. Now the fun begins for the
community — now it's your turn to
test, test and test some more.
Joomla
