Many current Joomla! users are eager to experience all the new features promised for Joomla! 1.6. Yet that won't happen until Joomla! 1.6 is in beta. And, in order to get to the beta status, there is one more Alpha release for us to test.
Last Sunday (10/25) Joomla! Development Team put Joomla! 1.6 Alpha 2 on the Web for everyone willing to assist in testing or familiarize herself/himself with all the new and improved functionalities. If you are interested in trying out this Alpha 2 release, please be warned that it is only for testing purpose and you shouldn't use it on a production system.
New improvements/features since alpha 1 include:
- ACL: access management for global permissions as well as content item specific permissions, variable usergroups, users member of more than one usergroup, permissions are inherited, really fast
- Extendable user profile, profile view in frontend, extendable user parameters
- Tableless com_content layouts
- Improved com_content modules (mod_articles_archive, mod_articles_latest, mod_articles_popular)
- Article linker plugin for editors
- New frontend template (atomic)
- New backend template (bluestork)
- New uploader for media manager
Joomla! 1.6 Alpha 2 is to be the last alpha release. The next release will be a beta version. If you prefer a release with a more stable feature set, then you should probably wait for the beta version. In the beta and final releases, you can also expect to see the following future improvements:
- Commenting solution is going to be added
- Additional DB drivers
- Lots of small performance/UI/code improvements
Now for anyone wants to try out Joomla! 1.6 Alpha 2, you can download it at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/joomla/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=3585. Any comments or discussions regarding this release can be posted at http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=454211.