Joomla! lead developer Johan Janssens announced the official Joomla! 1.5 Beta release date at the German Joomla! Day, in Bonn, today.
The announcement marks the most significant milestone in Joomla's short history. "We've decided to release on the 12th of October — exactly one year since we wrote our first line of Joomla! code," Johan said. "The coding effort by the 1.5 dev team has been amazing," he added. "We have built this release from the ground up ... this represents 127,000 lines of code and had this been a commercial venture, about 32 man years of effort equivalent to $1.7 million in wages." These figures put the value of the core team's work into sharp perspective.
The enthusiastic German Joomla! Day attendees listened intently as Johan made his best attempt at a Steve Jobs-style "one more thing" in announcing the release date while previewing the Beta to them.
We caught up with one of the core developers, Louis Landry, who wished everyone well via his mobile phone (Louis had been enjoying a well-deserved day at the beach). "I hope everyone has as much fun in Bonn as we did in San Francisco (LinuxWorld) and find as many friends as we found," Louis said. "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," he said. "It's a simplified but more powerful system. As a developer, it gives me the freedom and flexibility to build anything I want."
JOOMLA! 1.5 KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS
As with previous releases, Joomla! provides 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.
The goals for the Joomla! 1.5 release are to:
- Substantially improve usability, manageability, and scalability far beyond the original Mambo foundations.
- 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 backwards compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.
Finally, we'd also like to thank the Joomla! user community. With thousands of individuals participating in the Joomla.org forums and related Joomla! sites, we'll continue to listen carefully to your needs and prioritise new features into our roadmaps. To accommodate the growth of Joomla.org, Rochen is expanding our infrastructure by adding more powerful servers which will increase performance and ensure everyone can download the Joomla 1.5 beta and share in the all important testing process.
DON'T FORGET OCT 12
On October 12th, 2006, we invite you to be a part of this exciting time by downloading and evaluating Joomla! 1.5 Beta and we hope this release demonstrates our continued commitment to providing the most easy to use and comprehensive content management system available.
Stay tuned...