Joomla – the dynamic portal engine and content management system, making 2% of the web, holding 11% of the CMS Market and being the top 3 open source content management system along with WordPress and Drupal, released a new version armed with new arsenal like ACL, SEO, Speed, Power, Control and other functions.
Exploring the back-end features showed improvements on it’s user interface, the access control list under the User Manager have granular controls which can be assigned to users. A plus feature added is; it has update extension manager that also includes updating the Joomla Core files as well.
Joomla’s 1.6 big new features:
- New Access Control System — The user manager from older versions of Joomla has been replaced with a new Access Control List (ACL) that will let administrators have more granular control when creating user groups and offering user permissions to various aspects of a site. This is a big deal, especially since Joomla is so frequently used in intranet environments. The fact that Joomla now builds a solid ACL into the system, rather than relying on third-party extensions, is a great step for the platform.
- One-Click Extension Updates — Just as WordPress has a built-in plugin manager and auto-update tool, Joomla now does, too. This is great for administrators who have multiple sites with lots of extensions to manage.
- Template Styles — This is one of my favorite new features of Joomla 1.6. In the past, making changes to a template for just one aspect of a site meant basically creating a new template and changing the options you wanted to change manually. That works, of course, but it presents a lot of problems when trying to update a template or design as a whole. With template styles, designers can make variations of the same template that can be applied to specific sections or pages of a site.
- Template and Layout Overrides –Like template styles, I really like the ability to do layout overrides to change very minute aspects of a site — for things like menus or modules.
- Better Media Manager — For end users, the content manager is better than before, now supporting multiple-file uploads.
- Package Installation Feature — For developers who offer a number of different extensions or solutions that are interconnected, this is extremely cool. Basically this lets a developer create a single package that will install multiple extensions at the same time.
- Sections Be Gone — Say goodbye to sections and hello to categories! You can create unlimited sub-categories (with unlimited depth) for ultimate hierarchy and taxonomy control.
The downside, updating Joomla 1.5.xx to the 1.6.0 will be quite difficult since I haven’t found a migration tool, the section categories will some experience url redirects, site will end up gambling its serp results into the online casino reviews usa and probably a dip in the search engine ranking especially google pagerank.
Credits:
Mashable
Joomla 1.6
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