Labdemon

he following outlines the highlights of the second major release of Joomla!

As with previous releases, Joomla! provides a unified and easy-to-use framework for delivering content for websites of all kinds. To support the changing nature of the Internet and emerging web technologies, Joomla! required substantial restructuring of its core functionality and we also used this effort to simplify many challenges within the current user interface. Joomla! 1.5 has many new features.

The goals for the Joomla! 1.5 release are to:

• Substantially improve usability, manageability, and scalability far beyond the original Mambo foundations.
• Expand accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.
• Extend the integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).
• Enhance the content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.
• Achieve a more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.
• Deliver backwards compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

What are "extensions"?

Components, languages, modules, plugins and templates are now collectively known as Extensions.

Where did the installer go?

The improved installer can be found under the extensions option. With versions prior to 1.5 you needed to select a specific extension type when you wanted to install it. With Joomla! 1.5 you just select the extension you want to upload, and click on install. The installer will do all the hard work for you.

What happened to the locale setting?

This is now defined in the language .xml file in the language metadata settings. If you are having locale problems (dates don't appear in your language, for example) you might want to check/edit the entries in the locale tag. Note that multiple locale strings can be set and the host will usually accept the first one recognised.

Only one edit window! How do I create "Read more..."?

This is now implemented by inserting a tag (button is in the editor area) a