Arrival of Joomla! 1.6
Tuesday, 11 January 2011Yeah, Joomla! 1.6 Stable has arrived. Surely it is worth the wait - Joomla! 1.6.0 ships with exiting new features, many were waiting for: Tuning of access levels and user groups; multi-level category-structures; new APIs for faster extension development; and many more features. We would like to thank the Joomla! team for making all this possible. But what's next?
So what's next?
Many people will say that it is still too early to build a stable site with Joomla! 1.6. That's definitely a good advice. But anyone involved with building sites, should also know how to deal with Joomla! 1.6 and its features. Webdesigners and webdevelopers should familiarize themselves quickly with the new GUI of Joomla! 1.6 and its changed architecture. And for extension developers it is time to make all Joomla! 1.5 extensions compatible with 1.6.
Migrating Yireo extensions to Joomla! 1.6
As an extension developer ourselves, we have already begun with the migration of our code-base to 1.6. While we have many small Joomla! extensions (mainly plugins) available for free, we actually started first with the migration of our main battlecruiser MageBridge (which connects Joomla! to Magento): This might have been a wrong choice, because the amount of work involved.
The MageBridge API makes use of XML-RPC and the whole XML-RPC functionality (both client as server) is removed in Joomla! 1.6. We have already migrated this API to use JSON-RPC instead, but it will take some extra weeks to finish off this work. We expect MageBridge to be fully compatible with Joomla! 1.6 at the end of this month.
In the meanwhile, we will also pay attention to our other extensions: Popular extensions like Vm2Mage, Dynamic404 and SimpleLists will be migrated soon. We also had some other new features pending, so we expect to offer a complete flooding of new extension-releases in January and February.
Joomla! 1.6 Bootcamp in the Netherlands
For those interested in the new features of Jooma! 1.6, we offer a Joomla! 1.6 Bootcamp in the Netherlands, which will be held Tuesday 18th of January (next week). It will deal with the complicated bits of Joomla! 1.6: How to migrate templates and extensions to Joomla! 1.6, but also the practical usage of ACLs.
Check our Dutch site cursus.jira.nl/joomla-16-bootcamp for more information.