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 flexibility 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 participants 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.