tushev.org

The first time I encountered with Joomla 1.6 was about a year ago. Then I tried one of the alphas (don't remember, which exactly). That alpha was much like 1.5, but with refactored(nested and customizable) categories and user groups - things that I had always wanted in Joomla!

So beta3 impressed me enough. There is a lot of work done, and I can say that now I like Joomla! even more!

They have completely refactored administrator menu, and made it more intuitive. For instance, all things related to site - configuration, maintenance, cache purge, system info - are grouped in the Site menu. Similarly, everything related to users is grouped in Users menu, etc...

There are many new features added to the configuration, for instance, an option for choosing transliteration or unicode alias for non-latin article names. A new tab appeared, for setting permissions to user groups.

They have improved the usability a lot. There's at last Save and New button! This really can shorten the number of unnecessary clicks when adding content to the site. As well user interface is more friendly now to a newbie: there's no apply button. It's now called Save. And the other button is called Save and Close. Wonderful! (I'm tired of explaining the difference between this two buttons to customers).

Extensinon manager tabs now are: Install, Update, Manage, Discover, Warnings. no comments

As well admin panel has new design, which seems so fresh after using 1.5's Khepri. Unfortunately, the screenshots cannot completely reproduce the feeling from working with Joomla, so you'd better try it yourself.

However, because of the Beta status, there's a number of issues yet. I was ubable to login to administration after install until I used standart jos_ table prefix. It's impossible to save Global configuration :) There are other issues, but I'm not going to list them all. It's beta, and all of them are supposed to be corrected in the stable version.

So, I'm looking forward to it. :)