Using Joomla

Chapter 21. Joomla 1.6 and Beyond

This book was written just as Joomla 1.6 was developed and there are number of changes in the upcoming version. While we think that Joomla 1.5 will be around for several years to come, we thought it would be helpful for users to understand the benefits that Joomla 1.6 offers.

Changes and Improvements

Joomla 1.6 is the development team’s opportunity to dig deep and address some of the fundamental issues that were either held over from Joomla 1.0 or have become outdated. Following is a list of just a few of the features in development:

Article Manager

1. Elimination of the three-tiered category system. Users have been clamoring for this for a while. Though there’s wisdom in the three-tiered approach, especially for small to medium-sized sites, larger sites can quickly force site developers to get creative about their content structure. Sections have now been eliminated, so there are just Categories that contain your Articles. These Categories can be nested so your structure is virtually limitless. The new Content menu reflecting these changes can be seen in Figure 21-1.

2. No more trash. The article trash has been removed and integrated into the Article Manager itself as another state (like Published and Unpublished). It works in a similar fashion as the old trash, but eliminates the trash screen. In order to delete articles from the trash, you need to select the trash from the filter menu and then delete the articles.

3. No more Front Page Manager. The Front Page ...