Joomla becoming even more serious!

I met with some of the main developers behind Joomla at the JoomlaDay conference in London recently.  They gave us some tidbits about the new developments going on for future releases.  The really good news is that several of Joomla's shortcomings are going to be addressed soon.  Joomla shortcomings?  Yes, I have never said Joomla is perfect, but it sure beats most other CMS's out there.  Let me share some of the things they are busy working on now:

The access control

Joomla's access control layer, a hierarchy of user privileges, has always been considered a bit basic for a CMS of this size and ambition.  Drupal has been the best choice for someone who needs to finely control who can access what on the website.  As an example of something users sometimes ask for, but is not easily achieved in Joomla is: What if you want to give one type of editors access to one section of the website, and give another type of editors access to a different section?  It could be for instance a school with one section per class for instance, and you don't want teachers/editors to interfer with the other classes.

Well, this is still not solved in 1.5, but the developers tell me that the ACL is already a lot more advanced behind the scenes than what is currently exposed.  Soon you should be able to create as many access levels as you want.  The new ACL will have inheritance, so that you can base one group on another and it will inherit all the privileges of the parent.

Mootools

Joomla 1.5 started to use the famous Mootools edition 1.1.  I am reliably informed that Mootools has nothing to do with cows, but is a big Javascript library that enables a lot of cool features that would not otherwise be easily available.  Joomla 1.6 will start supporting newer features in Mootools edition 1.2

Easier code update

Today it's not very difficult to upgrade from one version to the next as long as you don't change Joomla core code.  It is just a matter of copying a patch file over the existing installation using FTP.  But it's going to become even easier.  Not only will the Joomla core have a simple update check and press-a-button application of the upgrade, but extensions can use the same functionality!  Upgrading a Joomla installation could be done in a matter of seconds.

The content hierarchy

Today the content hierearchy is somewhat limited.  It consists of sections->categories->articles.  An article must belong to one category, which must belong to one section.  You can't for instance assign an article to two different categories.  True, there are certain ways around that using extensions, but not something the average user would find easy.  So in 1.6 we are promised a more flexible hierarchy.

Better HTML

They are also working towards adhering to the strict XHTML standard, but this will not necessarily come in 1.6.

Other improvements to come

• Better LDAP support
• Improved user management
• A comment system (based on JXtended's) that includes ping/trackback support
• Plus more...