On the 22 of January the developers at Joomla announced the release of Joomla 1.5 Stable! If you have used Joomla before, you most likely have been awaiting the release of 1.5 for quite some time now. I have been running 1.5 stable for about 2 weeks now and I felt it was about time for a small review.
I must say that at first glance you do not notice much of a difference. Sure the user interface is a little cleaner and the admin section has rounded edges but beyond that, the differences seemed minimal. But then all of that changed, I started to learn more about the 1.5 framework and the possibilities and I must say that I am quite impressed. The 1.5 framework is what I would consider to be one of the best moves the Joomla team could have made. The code is cleaner, and much more flexible giving us programmers easier access to core Joomla items. I am excited to code using the 1.5 framework so expect to see some new components from MoeDesigns soon!
Here are some helpful links and info from www.joomla.com to help get you going with Joomla 1.5:
PACKAGES
RELEASE NOTES
Overview
Joomla! 1.5 Stable ushers in a new era for the project. Over the last 2 1/2 years the code base has been melted down and reforged into a carefully organized, object-oriented framework. The user interface has been thoroughly refined to improve usability and simplify administrative tasks. To simplify life for designers, the templating system has been expanded to allow meticulous control over core markup as well as an all new template configuration interface. But, this is just the beginning; the Functional Overview outlines the differences between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5 in much greater detail.
Because this is the first release after a massive code overhaul we fully expect issues to arise. For those people interested in migrating from Joomla! 1.0 please note that this is a continuously evolving process and is likely to be refined and optimized heavily over the next few weeks as feedback is received. There is no immediate need for people to migrate existing Joomla! 1.0 sites to 1.5 so please be patient as we do our best to make the migration process as smooth as possible for the myriad of configurations possible. Even if you don't plan to migrate your site in the near future we strongly encourage you to take Joomla! 1.5 for a test drive.
