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What started two and a half years ago with a letter to the community is culminating today with the release of Joomla! 1.5.

“Joomla! 1.5 boasts remarkable advances over Joomla! 1.0 in the areas of extensibility, usability and internationalization.”

“Over the last 2 1/2 years the code base has been melted down and reforged into a carefully organized, object-oriented framework. The user interface has been thoroughly refined to improve usability and simplify administrative tasks. To simplify life for designers, the templating system has been expanded to allow meticulous control over core markup as well as an all new template configuration interface.”

The article Joomla! 1.5 Overview details the major strong point of Joomla! 1.5 for site administrators, designers and developers:

Site administrators: many improvements in the installer, in global configuration, a simpler article manager and menu manager, and the new functionality of Search Engine Friendly URLs;

Designers: total control over how Joomla!’s content is presented, with use of custom layouts instead of the typical table heavy output from Joomla! core; no need to manually edit variables and settings in template files, now users can change settings from within the template manager interface;

Developers: architecture and design of the code base follows current development methodologies and design patterns; object-oriented, pattern based API organized into well structured framework packages; support to PHP 4.3 and to the most current versions of PHP 5.

For additional details, please refer to the Joomla! 1.5 release announcement.