Joomla 1.5 Review: 5 Reasons to Upgrade

The stable version of Joomla 1.5 recently was released to the public, and I’ve got a chance to implement it on a couple of different sites now. There are a few things moved around, but it’s still the same great content management system with a few great new features. Here are five features that might cause you to want to upgrade to Joomla 1.5.

On the Fly Preview – If you’re making changes to a page, you no longer have to save it before seeing what it’ll look like. Previously if you wanted to experiment with a page that you didn’t necessarily want to keep, you’d have to make a copy of it and then mess around with the copy so the original was intact. Now Joomla 1.5 offers a quick preview button that allows you to see what your new page will look like without having to save.

Improved Menu Management – Joomla’s menuing system received a significant overhaul in version 1.5. Previously you would have to click several buttons and configure things exactly how you wanted. With the new version of Joomla, you can add a new menu item with just three clicks.

New Media Manager – The media manager that is a part of Joomla received significant improvements in Joomla 1.5. There’s a vastly improved user interface that provides thumbnail and detail views of your content. You can also upload multiple files at once with easy and there are now some configuration choices that you didn’t have before.

Simplified Extension Manager – In Joomla version 1.0, there were separate installation pages for templates, components, mambots, and modules. Now there’s just one installation page that works with all of them. You just have to pick-out your file, and Joomla will determine what type of extension it is and install it in the appropriate place for you.

New Authentication Methods – In version 1.0 of Joomla, you were stuck with Joomla’s user accounts and had no other options. Joomla 1.5 now supports OpenID as well as LDAP, so you can integrate your existing user accounts with your new Joomla website. This is certainly a godsend for corporate intranet websites.

Joomla 1.5 has certainly made a number of significant improvements and is easily one of the top open source content managements systems available. Joomla 1.0 worked great, and now Joomla 1.5 has made what was good even better.

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