Joomla! 1.6 First Look: A concise guide to everything that's new in Joomla! 1.6.

Templates created for version 1.5 can't be used in Joomla! 1.6. The new release uses clean, semantic HTML code, without using tables for layout purposes. This is good news, as template developers are no longer required to add so-called template overrides in order to achieve a semantic design. However, it is one of the reasons that developers will have to upgrade their existing code to move a 1.5 template to version 1.6.

You shouldn't have any trouble finding a suitable template for a 1.6 site. New and updated templates are becoming available every day.

If you've got a site running on 1.5 and the extensions you are using haven't been updated to 1.6 compatibility, do not upgrade your production site to Joomla! 1.6. But, you can create a testbed and install 1.6 and get acquainted with the new features. Move to 1.6 when you've made sure that Joomla! 1.6 is stable, all desired features work as they should, and all necessary extensions and templates are available.

At first sight, Joomla!'s restyled and rearranged backend administration area may not seem really different from the 1.5 version . Here's what the new version looks like:

One of the usability improvements that will save you many unnecessary clicks is the introduction of tabbed buttons in many backend screens, allowing you to switch quickly to another screen to perform related tasks.

The screenshot below, for example, shows three tabs that are displayed in the Article Manager. When managing articles, these allow you to jump from the Articles screen to the Categories screen, where you can add or edit article categories, or to the Featured Articles screen, where you can assign articles to the homepage:

The administration area layout has been further updated allowing easier access to those features that you use regularly. For example, a new Users menu has been added to the top menu that gives you access to enhanced users, groups, and permissions tools (called Access Control Levels or ACL). This menu lets you add users, and define what they can and cannot see or do on the frontend and backend. The Users menu is where you set all Access Control Levels (see the New ways to manage user access section later on in this chapter).

In 1.6, the toolbar in the Administration area contains new options—each of them great time-savers. As an example, here's what the toolbar buttons look like when you're editing an article:

One example of a clever addition is the Save & New button. This allows you to quickly create a series of articles one after another without having to close the New Article screen.

A major innovation is that Joomla! 1.6 allows you to organize content exactly as you want. Up to Joomla! 1.5, you could only classify your content in three levels: sections would contain categories, and categories would hold articles.

Although this didn't pose problems for most sites, it was nevertheless a strange restriction. That's why Joomla! 1.6 introduces a more flexible system of classification. Categories can now hold an unlimited number of subcategories. This means that you can have a hierarchy like this:

A category can hold as many subcategories as you need. This concept is called "unlimited nested categories". In most cases you won't need more than two or three subcategories, but if you do, there's nothing to stop you.

You can check the content category hierarchy in the Category Manager. Child categories are displayed indented, with small gray lines indicating the sublevel:

The above screenshot shows the nested categories contained in the sample data that comes with Joomla! 1.6. As you can see, all article content is stored in subcategories of the main category Sample Data-Articles.

Adding menus and editing menus is something you'll do quite often in any CMS. In Joomla! 1.5, this basic functionality sometimes required many steps, clicking back and forth from the Menu Manager to the Module Manager. In 1.6, the Menu Manager now contains links to both the menu contents (the menu items themselves) and menu settings (the menu module details):

Moreover, when you add a menu link, you're now presented with a new list of clearly understandable Menu Item Types. For example, the Menu Item Type that was previously called Article Layout has been renamed to Single Article—which anyone new to Joomla! is much more likely to understand:

Of course, you don't have to use ACL when running a Joomla! site. If you're fine with the basic levels of user access that were present in 1.5, you can still use these. The 1.5 ACL levels are still the default configuration—it's just that you can now infinitely extend this system if you need that kind of control.

Using extensions is great—but there's also a weak point to relying on third party functionality. How do you keep track of updates for all the extensions you're running? In previous versions of Joomla!, you'd have to keep an eye on the Joomla! Extensions Database or the developers sites to see if updates were available. In real life, the difficulty of keeping track of upgrades has meant that many Joomla! sites are running with outdated add-ons, which cause security vulnerabilities and many other problems.

This is where Joomla! 1.6's new Extension Manager Update functionality comes to the rescue. With one click, you can search for updates for all installed extensions. If updates are available, you can install them immediately:

A strong point of Joomla! has remained: Joomla!'s intuitive template system enables site designers to customize the look and feel of their sites in just a few clicks, by swapping out the current template (and then rearranging module contents to fit the new template).

In Joomla! 1.6, it's easier to apply different templates to customize the looks of specific sections of the site: for example, if the visitor clicks on the News link on your site, another template can be applied, changing the looks of the site to fit that particular section.

Another new feature in this Joomla! release are Template Styles. Styles are combinations of template options, such as the template color scheme. Even if you apply just one template to the entire site, you can still select different template settings for specific site sections. One example of this is that you can have the home page of your site to display with a "green" color scheme (the first template style) and the other pages in the "blue" color scheme (the second template style):