In the world of Content Management Systems, Joomla is one of the most reliable and popular CMS platforms available. Stable, immensely configurable and extensible, it's used on some of the most highly trafficked websites on the Internet today. The recent release of Joomla 1.6 Beta gives a few tantalizing peeks into what to expect when the finalized version is released later this year. Experts are anticipating that the final version will be available by late summer 2010. While we're waiting for that to happen, we can take a look at some of the most important features and improvements expected to be included.
In terms of back-end requirements, Joomla 1.6 runs on no less than MySQL 5.0.4 and PHP 5.2 on the server side of things. With all the code work that went into Joomla 1.6, it needs serious, up-to-date software to run at all. Legacy mode has also been disabled so that all extensions and applications must run on Joomla 1.6 natively. Joomla 1.6 will continue the steady progression and evolution of the popular CMS with a focus on semantic markup and capabilities that take advantage of HTML5 and CSS3, standards which are increasingly being supported by all major browsers and streamline productivity for designers and developers.
Fortunately for extension and plug-in developers, reconfiguring older programs to conform to the new Joomla 1.6 API shouldn't take a lot of work and ought to be relatively easy. They haven't completely reinvented the wheel with the latest release, so it won't take a lot of modification to bring things up to snuff. In the short term, there may be some problems upgrading, but the long-term gains are worth it. In terms of SEO for websites that are upgrading from 1.5 to the latest version, URL rewrites are one of the major aspects to look out for, bu that's a relatively minor point.
