Joomla 1.6 Is Now Available for Download

Joomla 1.6 has been released after three years of the development. The latest release of the popular CMS comes with plenty of new features and changes, like better privilege control for users, better category structure and better international support. The new version also marks a change in the way Joomla is developed and released as new versions will be coming once every six months from now on.

"Rebuilt from the ground up in much of the application, this latest Joomla release will delight the casual site builder while helping small, medium, and enterprise businesses succeed in delivering web sites, intranets and applications to their respective markets," Joomla announced.

While, visually, Joomla 1.6 may not be a huge upgrade over the previous Joomla 1.5, the new version packs a lot of work under the hood.

Besides the new features, Joomla 1.6 also comes with a much cleaner code base, 30 percent lighter thanks to the removal of legacy code.

Admins now have more flexibility in how they manage users. They can create user groups, to define broad access rights for writing as well as viewing content.

The new Unlimited Depth Organizational Model enables users and admin to create much more complex or much simpler category structures, depending on their needs.

"With Joomla 1.6 developers will build extensions faster through all phases of design, deployment and updates. Advanced and rich API’s will provide new opportunities to integrate, compete and expand into existing and new markets," the release announcement explained.

"Style improvements give graphic designers more control and more flexibility to create the perfect effect for any web site and audience. Designers can now override virtually all output from the Joomla Administrator," it continued.

Joomla 1.6 is the latest CMS to drop support for PHP 4, after WordPress and Drupal. The minimum requirements are now PHP 5.2 and above, as well as MySQL 5.0.4.

Joomla 1.6 has been in testing since spring 2010 when the first beta landed. Incidentally, Drupal 7, one of Joomla's main competitor's, has been released only days ago.

Joomla 1.6 is now available for download here on Softpedia.