Joomla 1.6 is slowly but surely coming. I have to admit I am one supporter of Joomla and am eagerly , as always waiting for the full release date.  Lets now take a look at some of the features so far.

Improved template manager

Joomla! core member Andrew Eddie wrote in the following article about the new Template Manager in Joomla! 1.6. While there are some small improvements (like splitting up the template parameters into Basic Parameters and Advanced Parameters) the biggest feature seems to be Template Styles. Instead of just assigning a Joomla! template only once to a couple of pages through Page Assignment, with Joomla! 1.6 you can create multiple styles and assign each style to certain pages. Even though it has been practices in some Joomla! templates where we see options of changing background color or page width, it was , however not fully intergrated in the Joomla! system.

An example: Let’s say you have a Joomla! template which offers a parameter to switch the overall color of the website (red, green and blue). Now, if you want to simulate various sections in your site, you might want section 1 to have a red color, section 2 to have a green color and section 3 to have a blue color. Because Joomla! 1.5 only allows you to assign a full template to certain pages, the only workaround is to make three copies of the same template.

Syntax highlighting when editing index.php

A major improvement is also the syntax highlighting when editing code through the Template Manager. With Joomla! 1.5 we always recommend web developers to use a separate HTML-editing program (like Dreamweaver) and then upload the files through FTP to Joomla!. One of the main reasons for this is syntax highlighting, which adds nice colouring to all HTML-code, CSS-code and JavaScript-code, so web developers can reckognize tags easily.

Now with Joomla! 1.6 the Template Manager offers syntax highlighting – making it much easier to modify templates through the Joomla! Administrator panel.

Redirect System Plugin

One other feature of Joomla! 1.6 is the Redirect System Plugin, which is accompanied by the Redirection component. The plugin allows for redirection of 404-pages to other pages. Instead of just showing an ugly red error-box when a page could not be found, the Redirection functionality allows you to configure destination URLs to which the visitor should be redirected.

So much to look forward to the new version