Joomla! lead developer Louis Landry announced Joomla's release candidate of Joomla! 1.5 today. The much-anticipated announcement of Joomla's amazing new framework was met with with enthusiastic applause. Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, Wilco Jansens delivered the good news to a group of Joomla! fans in Germany.

"This release candidate is more than one small step for Joomla!," Louis said. "It's a massive technology step for open source as a whole. This release candidate marks a defining moment in Joomla! history ... our progression away from old legacy code into a more powerful, flexible modern framework."

Wilco Jansens, who has been co-ordinating the release, anticipates great things. "We hope to go to RC2 (Release Candidate Two) early August and Stable should follow very quickly after," he said. "While working in the engine room over recent weeks, we knew we were on the brink of something great. Let the fireworks begin," he said.

Joomla! Sells Out!

Joomla!Day Central USA (Austin) organiser Chris Justice described the timing of the 1.5 release as 'highly appropriate'. "The Joomla!Day has been sold out for some time and unfortunately we've had to turn people away," he said. "We're elated with the massive response and we're already planning a potential event in the Fall."

Lead developer Johan Janssens, who was unable to attend Austin, described the release candidate as proof of the health and activity of the Joomla! project. "We have an incredible team with some of the brightest coding minds in open source, "he said. "I am obviously biased but I'll say it anyway ... Joomla! 1.5 is the finest software release I've had the pleasure to be involved with. What's more, the team has continued to stay focused when other distractions have been in the wind. This is testimony to the strength of the core team, ensuring good things happen."

Codename Mapya

We've codenamed Joomla! 1.5 RC1 "Mapya" which is Swahili for "new".

The goals for the Joomla! 1.5 release are to:

• Substantially improve usability, manageability, and scalability far beyond the any Mambo origins, hybrids or incantations.
• Expand accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.
• Extend the integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
• Enhance the content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.
• Achieve a more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.
• Deliver considerable backwards compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

Joomla! 1.5 Stable is so close we can smell it.

1.5 is the Future ... What about 1.0?

Now let's share some legacy news. Today also marks an incremental bug fixing and security update for Joomla! 1.0 series software. Quality and Testing Coordinator Robin Muilwijk has been doubly busy preparing packages for an update for Joomla! 1.0.12 to 1.0.13. "We wanted to send out a clear message that we will continue to support the 1.0 series," he said. Wilco Jansens added that Joomla! would continue to support the legacy code for the old codebase for quite some time.