Joomla! 1.6 Beta is out
Wednesday, 19 May 2010This week the Beta-version of the upcoming Joomla! 1.6 was released to the public. While not ment for running production sites, this release gives a wonderfull insight on what things are awaiting when 1.6 becomes stable. Let's see what's there already.
Key feature of Joomla! 1.6: ACLs
The biggest feature in Joomla! 1.6 seems to be ACLs (or Access Control Lists), which defines which user can use which resource. Through this mechanism, you can create additional usergroups and permissions to these usergroups. It has long been awaited, because other CMSes like Drupal and typo3 already had such functionality for years.
But while this functionality sounds great, the question is whether many administrators will actually start using it. The reason for this is that ACLs are not simple at all. Personally we make the comparison between Joomla! 1.6 and Cisco router access-rules (or alike): You have full power, not only to make a very secure system but also to mess things up big time.
Joomla! 1.6 ACL specialists?
Most likely, a need for Joomla! 1.6 ACL specialists will grow as soon as Joomla! 1.6 is rolled out on production sites. While regular Joomla! 1.6 administrators can easily add usergroups, creating more complex structures requires experience and a deep understanding of Joomla!. For sure this creates a whole new business opportunity.
No more sections
One of the downsides of Joomla! was also that you could organize your content only using an hierarchy of two levels (sections and categories). Many third party extensions solved this problem by adding their own category-mechanism. Now, with Joomla! 1.6, categories can contain subcategories, and subcategories can again contain subcategories. This principle makes complex hierarchies possible, and actually makes sections obsolete - they have there for been removed from Joomla! 1.6 as well.
Easy updates
Using the new Update Manager, extensions can easily be updated to their latest version - as long as they provide a download URL to fetch the update from. This new cool feature will ease the pain of checking for upgrades and it will replace the many update-workarounds with one official procedure. Extension developers need to update their XML-definitions to support this new feature.
Conclusion
There are more nice features as well. Some of them will be blogged about by us as well, while we also start a set of tutorials explaining the bits and pieces of ACLs. Stay tuned.