Status of Joomla! 1.6 Beta 1

[Hannes Papenberg]

Hello folks,
quite some time ago we released Joomla! 1.6 Alpha and the first plan was
to release 1.6 Beta 1 six weeks after that Alpha release. When the time
came, we were not ready and had to delay the release further. This was
due to several reasons, the first being, that our code wasn't ready.
Especially the ACL system is still at this time not 100% finished. I
have to take fault for this, since I promised to deliver a proposal and
due to personal circumstances did not fulfill this promise. (I'm
currently working on this code and am going to deliver asap)

Another reason was, that we wanted to give the work from the Google
Summer of Code the possibility to be included into 1.6. In the last
weeks we had some very productive discussions on the mailinglist about
new features and changes to existing ones. In the end however, we are
already very much behind the original schedule planned when 1.5 was
released. We had/have several fixed feature lists, which were supposed
to be the featureset for 1.6 and which then were weakened by discussions
on the list or people proposing additional features that they would send
in code for. We had a similar situation in Mambo times and also some
time during 1.5 development and its called feature creep. This delays
release and overall development, which is why we looked at that
featurelist again and updated it. The main features of 1.6 have always
been ACL and finishing some of the stuff that has been laying around
since 1.5 (mainly making all extensions MVC).

The list had of course some more entries, like the nested categories
feature and the new core output. But in the end we tried to stay true to
those features that were in the first feature list for 1.6. This
especially means that we are not going to make big changes to
com_content and that we are not going to add in more completely new
components. As has been mentioned elsewhere before, 1.7 will feature a
complete overhaul of com_content where we properly can fit in
taxonomy/tags, multi-language content, versioning and all other features
that were discussed on the list. This provides these features the time
to properly mature and 1.6 can ship earlier. :-)

We have updated the feature list for 1.6 here:
http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_1.6_Development_Status

Now what does that mean for the 1.6 Beta 1 release? Some final decisions
have to be made on the ACL system, which should be made by all of us
until today in one week. After that, these decisions have to be
implemented into the trunk, as well as as many of the other features on
the list. This said, we are aiming for the Beta 1 release in two to
three weeks from today. We are depending on your help on this to make
this happen!

Hopefully this clears up some of the questionmarks about the current
development of 1.6. So lets get this baby rolling. :-)

Hannes for the 1.6 Release Team

[Denitz]

"Some final decisions have to be made on the ACL system, which should
be made by all of us until today in one week"

Please add "Guest" access level:
http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-dev-cms/t/3b850a02f051fa2f

[Christophe Demko]

I can work on what is called "Hooks for external authentication
systems".

What is the functionnality needed? I developed an extension for Joomla!
1.5 http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/auth_manager/ which consists in
managing external authentication sources as CAS for example

Let me know.

[Gary Brooks]

You all are doing a great job! Keep up the good work.   Thanks for the great update. 

Gary Brooks
http://www.cloudaccess.net

[Mircea]

Hello

Any news about beta 1 version? Can i test it?

On Aug 31, 6:24 pm, Gary Brooks <garyjaybro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You all are doing a great job! Keep up the good work.   Thanks for the great
> update.
>

> Gary Brookshttp://www.cloudaccess.net

>
> On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Hannes Papenberg

> <hackwa...@googlemail.com>wrote:

> >http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_1.6_Development_Status<http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla%21_1.6_Development_Status>

[Amy Stephen]

There is a nightly download of development:

http://dev.joomla.org/nightly/joomla_trunk/joomla_trunk_svn.tar.gz

At this time, the developers are not looking for bug notices since development is in full swing and problems are guaranteed.

Announcements by the Production Leadership Team are shared on the Joomla! Community Web site. The latest announcement was about a week ago:

http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1040-news-from-the-production-leadership-team.html

As you can see from the announcement, Alpha 2 is next, rather than Beta. 

In the future, it's probably best to ask this type of question in the forums.

Cheers!