So friends Joomla 1.5 stable is released. It is a historical release as joomla 1.5 has remarkable advances over Joomla! 1.0 in the areas of extensibility, usability and internationalization. Also, building new extensions is much easier and faster because of the comprehensive new API. The simplified user interface eliminates unnecessary clicks and context changes for site administrators. It has taken place after 2 and half years of hardwork by Joomla developers. Programmers across the globe have contributed enormous amounts of time and energy to make Joomla 1.5 what it is today. As a open source content management system, there is no doubt joomla is number 1 but as a blogging platform it is far behind wordpress. Now this release will provide some new features to bloggers so that they can use joomla as an alternative to wordpress.
For those readers who does not know anything about joomla, I would like to quote
Joomla! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the world wide web and intranets. The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo. It is written with the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database by default.
The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which are built to be as modular as possible, allowing extensions and integrations to be made easily. An example of such are extensions called “Plugins”.(Previously known as “Mambots”.) Plugins are background extensions that extend Joomla with new functionality. The WikiBot, for example, allows the author of Joomla content to use “Wikitags” in Joomla articles which will auto-create dynamic hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles when displayed. There are over 2,500 extensions for Joomla available via the Extensions Directory, a site that OpenSourceMatters runs as an official directory of extensions.
In addition to Plugins, more comprehensive extensions are available. “Components” allow webmasters to perform such tasks as build a community by expanding user features, backup a website, translate content and create URLs that are more friendly to search engines. “Modules” perform such tasks as displaying a calendar or allowing custom code like Google AdSense etc to be inserted within the base Joomla code. Overall Joomla is ahead of its competitors open source cms like drupal and wordpress.
You can download this latest version from here.
