Joomla 1.7 CMS Released!

Open source software developer Joomla (www.joomla.org) announced on Tuesday it has released Joomla 1.7, which includes newly enhanced security tools and features.

Among these new improvements are pre-defined search options, a new defense against form manipulation, and language specific font settings.

In addition, the entire Joomla open source community has improved the development lifecycle for its CMS to make future release dates more predictable, and enabled users to more easily contribute content and migrate to the latest version.

“Security is an important aspect of any CMS. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure your personal or organizational security needs are being met,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “With Joomla 1.7 the user community placed a large emphasis on making the CMS installation process as simple as possible and new versions more frequent. This will allow users to more easily and frequently migrate to the latest version of Joomla, and take advantage of all the security benefits associated with running the newest code. We think Joomla users around the world will really embrace this new process.”

Some of the main enhancements with Joomla 1.7 include one click version updating, which lets users update a site to the latest stable Joomla release.

The six-month release cycle allows for a shorter development cycle that will enhance Joomla’s stability by providing more core feature development and adoption. There will be long-term support available for 15 months, starting with Joomla version 1.8.

The libraries folder will now be split from the actual CMS, allowing the Joomla platform to be enhanced outside of Joomla and used for other types of development projects. This will result in more effective and quality development.

The latest version also includes the ability to create a search menu option with pre-defined search options, better example code for different plug-in types, the ability to automatically validate form data against a list of options when saving, enables the submit article form to automatically set the article category, and multilanguage improvements allow developers and administrators to associate menu items in different languages for faster navigation.

The development of Joomla 1.7 is the collaborative effort of thousands of Joomla developers and millions of everyday users that have downloaded the CMS to date, including feedback from more than 2.3 million Joomla forum posts, 490,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 7,900 Joomla extensions.