Joomla! (http://www.joomla.org), a popular open source content management system (CMS), today announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6. Designed to offer enhanced site control and a more polished user experience, Joomla 1.6 delivers a variety of new tools to improve website management and access, a more robust organizational structure for content control, and various other user-experience improvements throughout the software. 

“With new features and capabilities such as the hierarchical design of the access control system, semantic XHTML layouts, one-click extension updates and multi-language functionality, Joomla 1.6 has evolved to become the most user-friendly and powerful tool to develop a web presence,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a not-for-profit created to provide organization, legal, and financial support to the Joomla project. “This has been accomplished through the tireless feedback and work on 1.6 by the thousands of members of the Joomla community over the past year.” 

Joomla’s ease-of-use and extensibility has made it the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the industry today (it has been downloaded more than 22 million times), according to Joomla leadership. It is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s and many more. MC Press Online runs on Joomla 1.5. 

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:          

• New Access Control System—allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content

• Unlimited Depth Organizational Model—gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.

• One-Click Extension Updates—allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.

• Semantic XHTML Layouts—provides a better baseline for content presentation.

• Multi-language Functionality – Gives a basic way to implement a multi-language site. 

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This makes it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing. 

“The current Joomla Platform provides developers the tools they need to rapidly build the Web of the future,” said Ron Severdia, a member of the Joomla production leadership team. “Although 1.6 is being released today, the Joomla production team is not resting on its laurels. We are hard at work developing updated features to Joomla with even more powerful search capabilities and ways to leverage website content.” 

Visit www.joomla.org to download Joomla 1.6.