I went and gave it a try. It has a slick interface to the admin area. Some of the placement of different functions seems to make more sense.
I think for a lot of people it looks like Joomla out of the box will meet most peoples needs. Haven't had a lot of time to play with it though.
any day soon for a year
I've given up waiting for the final release of Joomla 1.5. Don't hold you breath on it happening soon. Though, it could happen tomorrow.
Joomla has been a release candidate for months. Months and months. But, this long wait is understandable. It was such a substantial rewrite that it's going to take awhile to find and work out all the kinks.
Just don't wait up at night or dream like a kid around Christmas for it. You could be waiting a couple more months. Or, it could be tomorrow.
Now, is Joomla what many church and ministry sites need out of the box? I'll reserve judgement on that until after I take it for a spin.
Do a lot of church and ministry leaders think it's what they need out of the box? I'm sure they do. But, in a lot of cases I wonder if church and ministry leaders know what they really need. If they did they'd be in a lot better place than many of them in wester culture are.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
The 1.5 wait
When I looked at Joomla in December of 06 it was clear that a stable well supported v1.5 would be a real contender for for our needs (and 1.0 would not). But due the nature of the project the magnitude of the changes it still isn't ready and it will not be well supported by native extensions and theme templates for probably another 6 months....
Since that time I've joined the Drupal tribe.
I like what I'm not seeing just wish it was ready a year (or two?) sooner.
Mark
future Joomla releases should be faster
This long wait for the Joomla 1.5 release has impacted it in a negative way. I can only imagine how big Joomla would be if that release were sooner. But, due to the nature of the changes it just takes that long. I'd expect the future releases to be faster as I'd be surprised if they did such a large undertaking again anytime soon.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
what's new?
What are the big improvements in Joomla 1.5?
I had a quick look at an install and I could only see the menu's had been moved around abit in the admin screen.
What are the big changes for an end user or administrator?
Paul Vaartjes
developer changes
I'm sure there are a lot of great user and administer changes. If someone can sent a link to them or list some we'd greatly appreciate it.
The changes that I know about are developer changes. In many ways this is a developer release. Developing extensions for Joomla is supposed to be much better now.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
Joomla 1.5 Improvements
The best place I found listing the improvements is Joomla Girl's Journey. Thats a simple list, but Joomla also has a pretty extensive list of changes and documentation On the Joomla Forums.
Nice List
Thanks for the lists. Joomla Girls list is short and to the point. This is a very good jump for them. The internationalization is huge. Most people don't speak english. Database abstraction opens up a lot of opportunities. I'm surprised they didn't have XML-RPC or the separation of layers before. That's an important addition.
The biggest thing is the overhaul of the extension setup.
I can't wait for a release of Joomla and Drupal 6. I'm starting to get excited like a kid at Christmas.... oh no.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
You can now make a Joomla
You can now make a Joomla site without using tables.
You can easily overide the output of the moduls and tweek the code.
Joomla 1.5 rules.
Sort Of
Joomla 1.5 made a big leap away from tables (a good thing). But, as I understand it a lot of the tables that are painful are in the extensions. So, this tabled pain will linger until the extensions are updated.
I'm curious about the easy overriding of the extensions outputs. Is this something you need some good PHP knowledge to do? Do you, in essence, have to write you own presentation layer for an extension?
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com