The popular open source content management system (CMS) Joomla has released the newest version, i.e version 1.5. Overall, this is the latest stable version after they have recently organized the “Squash Bugs” events with the purpose to fix the priority 1 & 2 bugs in this version before it went public download. Since Joomla first inception in two and a half years ago, the version 1.5 represented a milestone for them, as several new enhancements can be found on it. Building extensions will be much easier and faster with the new API released by Joomla. Other than this, new user interface for site administrators, with several functional improvements ranging from single installer, media manager, core article manager to friendly search engine URLs. As stated by them, one of the most powerful features of the Joomla framework is the new component objects based on the Model-View-Controller programming pattern, in which Ruby on Rails, another Web development framework that heavily based on.

Until now, for existing Joomla sites that still using version 1.0, this version remains as a “caution” if they want to migrate their sites to this newest version. The main reason was that this upgraded version has nothing to do with any of the security problems found on the previous version 1.0 and the version 1.5 is still under refinement when refers to the migrating issue.

Joomla!, one of the popular open source content management systems (CMS) is organizing the “Squash Bugs” events in the U.S., Canada, and Belgium. The squash bug days will fall on 8th, 9th and 10th of December, in the following cities that include Washington, New York, Mountain View, San Francisco, Vancouver and Brussels. The purpose of organize these events is to fix the priority 1 & 2 bugs in its newest version, i.e. 1.5 since this version is not that popular as version 1.0 in the eyes of several users, and after any bug fixed of this Joomla! CMS, it will be carried forward as the upcoming stable version of version 1.5 Release Candidate 4.

It is important to organize this kind of events in order to raise the confidence of Joomla! users when come to using version 1.5. There is still a huge crowd of users throughout the world that still prefer Joomla!’s previous version 1.0 as it provide the most stable compatibility to some extensions, one example is the shopping cart VirtueMart, its 1.0.x series is officially not compatible to Joomla! 1.5, as stated by VirtueMart. In addition, several Joomla! templates provider when they sell their templates to the end users, the key features of the templates also Joomla! 1.0 compatible.