It was announced by Joomla.org that the Beta for Joomla! 1.5 is expected to be released on October 12th. Some of the goals and features that are to be included in this new version of the content management system are:

• Substantial improvement in usability, manageability, and scalability. The project team's goal is to improve Joomla! "far beyond the original Mambo foundations".

• Expanded accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

• Additional integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

• Enhanced content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.

• A more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.

• Deliver backward compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

Of all the features listed above, I would think organizations would be most excited about in Joomla! 1.5 is the ability to support remote authentication services such as LDAP. Most organizations would like to see their employees only have to log into their enterprise software once and not have separate user names or passwords to access e-mail, calendar system, groupware, and content management systems.

Finally, I am amazed that Joomla! has been able to maintain backwards compatibility with previous releases. There is a debate currently going on in various open source projects to whether maintaining backward compatibility helps or hurts a project. I suppose we'll just have to keep our eyes and ears open to see if one particular development path is better than the other.