Compass Designs

What will be in Joomla 1.6?

As Joomla 1.5 was in development, a clear path was outlined that described much more frequent milstones in terms of development. This basically meant faster progression to add features as Joomla moved from 1.5 to 1.6 etc.

I came across a recent forum post by Andrew Eddie that stated we might see Joomla 1.6 as early as August!

Quote

1.6 is still in the planning stage. We are current assessing 109 feature requests for inclusion ranging from very big things (like ACL) to very small things. No dates for anything are set but I'd like to tepidly "aim" for an August-ish release (all things going well).

Now, whether we see this target met is not the topic of this post, rather its what new features might we see in Joomla 1.6?

On the Joomla forum is a board that has been taking white paper submissions fo a couple of months. The deadline was the 25th of March, so now as the dust settles, we can see what white papers have been placed under review. Looking purely at views and posts, we can see the following features as hot items.

1. [31]Option to turn off Mootools 
2. [32]Layout control for Front Page articles
3. [15]Access Management in Joomla! 1.6
4. [34]Content versioning for Joomla!
5. [33]Remove unusefull stuff
6. [34]Multi-Blogger Component/Module
7. [33]Section/Category Manager
8. [33]Expanded Search Capabilities
9. [32]Bring back blog-content section menu link
10. [15]extend DB layer - implement PDO, or other DB-s like Pg

As you read through these, a another valuable resource is the Joomla Developer White Paper Analysis that is on the Joomla! Devel Discussion.

My predictions?

I think we will see improved ACL, some progress towards version control and some minor tweaks like Mootools options and bring back the menu link.

As for the other features, well, what you you like to see in Joomla 1.6?