Joomla CMS releases first major upgrade

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 18 October 2006 14:22

Your IT - Home IT

One of the world's most widely used open source content management systems, Joomla, has undergone its first major upgrade, in the process creating a divergent path from its parent project Mambo.

In late 2005, the then Mambo development team walked off the project and formed the Joomla Project. Since then, both projects have continued to run in parallel, with both camps and their user bases knowing all too well that sooner or later the products would diverge and no longer be interchangeable or compatible. That time has arrived.

According to Joomla Project leader, Johan Janssens, the Joomla upgrade from version 1 to 1.5 is a major ground up rewrite and will not be a straight forward upgrade but a platform migration.

"Improvements will not be as noticeable for users as they will be for developers," says Janssens. "However, there will be improvements in performance via page caching which will allow pages to be cached on the browser. There will also be improvements to the image handling system

As for developers, they will find major improvements in flexibility, according to Janssens, including improved internationalization capabilities, with the addition of right to left language support and added RSS functionality.

In the past year, Joomla has gathered a considerable user base ranging from small businesses right up to large organizations such as the United Nations. The open source content management system is designed to run on any dedicated or shared server with php and mysql.