A little while back I said that I would be reviewing the release of Joomla 1.6 Beta once it was released. Well before I could say here it is and this is what it does there was the immediate release of Joomla 1.6 Beta 2. This of course ment that the small amount of time I spent installing Joomla 1.6 Beta 1 was a complete waste of time therefore I thought it best that I review Beta 2. What I found about Beta 2 is not only exciting but well worth the read.At first glance there was a few noticable changes when you first login. It does look like the interface has had a bit of a face lift as you will see in the screenshot below.
As you will see alot of the common features and functions are in place from J1.5. A big improvement is the new icons they have been put together for this release. To start off any Joomla site you should always config all your basic site settings. So lets have a look at Global Configuration. This was somewhat refreshing with its layout and you will see straight away there are some massive improvements.
So lets go through this panel. First of all you have the basic Site Settings. In here you cover things like the site name, whether the site is online or offline, the offline message you wish to have while your site is offline, editor etc. This is standard sort of stuff that come in Joomla 1.5 so nothing new here.
Metadate Settings has a new field called “Content Rights” which at first glance is a bit of a waste but it gives you the opportunity to let others know what usage rights they have when it comes to your content. Then you have required * next to site meta description and keywords. This you could probably leave and should consider leaving as these tend to go on a global level so in otherwords it is site wide.
The Seo Settings has finally got some substance and more features. Unicode aliases is probably a bit of a waste for most users but the new “Add Site Name to Page Titles” option is handy and one that Joomla has been missing since day dot.
Ok this system panel is somewhat smaller and probably a little disappointing from a developers standpoint but more than sufficient for most other users. A cool feature is you can now debug modules. You will see I have set the Session Lifetime to 150. This is currently set at 150 Minutes. I have done this so I can review Joomla 1.6 for this article. I would recommend that you leave it to 10-15 minutes at most.
For the most part the Server Settings tab is not something that needs much work but WHAT THE HELL was Joomla thinking when they did the timezone section. It was great they went to UTC but the timezones list is alot bigger and quite frankly for america it is probably ok as there are alot more cities than Australia and probably alot more timezones. In Australia there is way too many options for a smaller country or a country with fewer states.
This panel is probably one of the most exciting additions to Joomla 1.6 and that is the most anticipated release of their very own ACL system. First glances is this is very daunting looking and something that is going to make it hard for some administrators to follow. The basic settings are already in place so for most people they will not need to change the settings but for administrators like myself you will probably want to change them to suit the needs of your next project.
So far this is all looking really impressive. The next thing to look at is what significant changes have been made to this system. It is understandable as to why so much time has been lost in planning of this new platform. The menu structure has changed and this is something that is for the better. There has been some small modifications which I can say is a little disappointing. Things like the articles management. It has finally got rid of sections and now there is only categories with potentially unlimited sub categories BUT this comes at a cost. Frontpage Manager has departed, media manger has migrated its way to the Content menu for some stupid reason but none the less it had to go somewhere.
The amount of components installed by default have finally been knocked on the head. It comes with basic options like contacts, weblinks, messaging, newsfeeds and banner management. What is new with components? Believe it or not FINALLY we have a redirects component designed to help with your 404 and 301 pages. So this is killing the need for some comprehensive SEF and SEO components like sh404sef. Does this work well with other components? This no one can really answer until components are compatible.
Templates is probably another core area that alot of people care about so in brief, here is the long and short of the template manager. There is now more templates installed by default for both the frontend and the backend of the website. These templates are nothing spectacular so you are probably wanting to stick with the basic administrator template called “Bluestork” and the Beez2 template.
There are more settings and options to duplicate templates so you can make your own customizations. You can customize your templates and how has access to them etc. You even have more control over the templates and styling of not only the main template that people see but also the Print Views. This is one feature which has been sorely missed and asked for by many for so long now. For the most part the coding used in the templating system has remained the same as it was in J1.5.x but with a few added features.
In conclusion is Joomla 1.6 what people have been after? Will it bring Joomla to the next level? Given that Joomla 1.5 was a great success and has proven to be a great system for the most part I think not only is it a great progression towards making it the best Content Management System out there but one that will certainly set some standards when it comes to Content Management Systems as a rule. WordPress and Drupal will certainly have a lot of things they need to do to keep up. If Joomla was to become a paid for application there is no reason why I would not pay $300-$400 per license. It seems a little high price wise but honestly paying for this application would ensure its longevitiy and success. Not only that but it is certainly worth every cent. While it is currently free I would say if you overlook Joomla you are certainly doing yourself in justice. The next few months will see the release of Joomla Beta 3 and hopefully a stable release. With this in mind it is only going to get better.
