Open Source Network Blog

Ray Bogman

Ray Bogman is a former security expert at KPN, is co-founder of Jira ICT, gives Magento and Joomla! consults and trainings. Authors profile

Joomla! version 1.5 was released almost a year ago. So what's happening with Joomla! 1.6? How much work is already done? Developers who are interested in Joomla! 1.6 can take a sneak preview at the next version of Joomla! by checking out the sources with Subversion (SVN).

Subversion is the application that the Joomla! development team uses to keep track of all the changes (commits) made by the various developers. It is a very popular program but takes some practice to get used to.

While the Subversion server is managed by the Joomla! team, there are several client-programs (Windows, Mac, Linux) that allow you access to the development environments. With a client like TurtoiseSVN you are able to copy the current development tree of the Joomla! team to your own development environment, so you can keep track of the latest changes.

Checkout the development trunk

The key is to use the right URL:The URL http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/ is used for the trunk of the Joomla! 1.6 code. The trunk is the place where all code goes that has already been approved by the majority of the core members, but as it is still a development trunk the code is by far not ready for production.

With a command like the following you can check out the SVN sources of the main Joomla! trunk where the 1.6 sources reside:

svn checkout http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/

Installation

After downloading the sources of Joomla! 1.6 it is time to install the CMS for real. Treat the files as regular Joomla! files, copy them into a webspace, navigate in your browser to this webspace and start the installation. The installation is the same as Joomla! 1.5. The only chance you will have when using the sources from SVN is that the installation-scripts are not perfect - beware of the fact that with developement code even the installation might fail.

So what's there today in Joomla! 1.6?

Taking a look at the current state of the 1.6 trunk, we could say the following:

• Most importantly Joomla! 1.6 will bring more advanced ACLs to Joomla!. With ACLs you can define more complex access rights to various parts of the system, and you can create your own user-groups to link these rights to a specific type of user. This is accomplished in Joomla! 1.6 through two types of components: Access Control (com_acl) and Members (com_members). The first is of the same complexity as current 1.5 solutions (JACL, JUGA) while Members allows you to define new groups. The current functionality seems to work but still needs a lot of testing.
• Articles have not changed, except for small enhancements like a little warning which indicates the Meta Description of an article is missing.
• The Global Configuration now allows you to define a "root user" which is by default the first Super Administrator created (again by default the user "admin"). Probably this means that in the future there will be a difference between a Super Administrator and a root user as well.
• The Extension Manager not only allows you to install or remove extensions, but also update them. The update-mechanism has still to be made public, but the basics are already there and probably used by various extensions.
• Last not least Joomla! 1.6 also makes it a lot easier to localize the Joomla! installation by offering a Translation Manager (com_localise) which would allow you to update more easily a translation created by one of the official Joomla! Translation partners.

Conclusion

I'm not part of the Joomla! core team, but hopefully I was still able to tell something interesting about Joomla! 1.6 just by looking at the current development tree in SVN. Ofcourse any of the features above could be removed from SVN, but the main conclusion: Something good is on the way.