Bit 'n Java

Joomla!, the open source CMS (content management system) has made great progress in its development since its early versions which were a cousin of Mambo. The developers of Joomla have been very busy building a new version of the CMS which will greatly improve the operations of the previous versions.

In the current version, 1.5, the menu system was overhauled for easier use. The multiple different menus that delineated certain related tasks were combined into one logical place and the installation of extensions was made easier. For those of us who go under the hood, the coding from version 1.0 to 1.5 also changed.

Now, bigger changes will be coming to version 1.6 which is now in the Alpha stage of development. One of the changes will be in extensions management which will greatly improve how we work and update extensions currently installed in the system. However, two of the greatest changes are to the content structure, the ACL (Access Control List) and the content management structure.

In the previous versions of Joomla!, users could only be designated as to how much they could edit content or change the physical structure of the CMS. Now, with the updated ACL, different users will be able to be given  permissions to edit and publish certain pages, a big development step which other CMS sytems already use.

The second major change is in the structure of organization of content. In previous versions, there were two layers, sections and categories. One would create different sections and within those sections would create various categories, but you could not create anything lower than the first layer of categories. Now, with the proposed new structure, sub-categories will be allowed to greatly break down the content articles.

These advancements from my perspective will open up great possibilities for the system to not only the small business owner, but also larger organizations such as schools which need individualized editing for classwork. There are many other possibilities which will open up with a little bit of creativity.