Ladies and Gentlemen...

Created: 21 January 2008 People have contributed enormous amounts of time and energy to make Joomla! 1.5 what it is today. Developers collaborated over long distances, around the clock, enthusiastically contributing to Joomla!. Hours writing code combined with intense discussions on everything from usability to extensibility have defined many developers' lives over the last two and a half years. Countless others have identified and fixed bugs along the way. Documenters have tracked changes to help make life easier for everyone who uses or develops in Joomla! 1.5. Translators for dozens of languages have prepared language packs. Huge amounts of time and energy have gone into event organization, team management, and infrastructure upkeep. Our forums are overflowing with those asking and answering questions about Joomla! 1.5, helping overcome problems and reaching out to newcomers in a concerted effort to be helpful.

Our growing and vibrant open source community is innovating in many ways. The response from community members in both development [Pizza Bugs and Fun] and documentation [Doc Camp] has been both overwhelming and warming. The Google Highly Open Participation Contest energized and excited mentors and students alike, while helping solidify Joomla!'s future by involving talented young people in producing and supporting open source software.

As an application, Joomla! 1.5 boasts remarkable advances over Joomla! 1.0 in the areas of extensibility, usability and internationalization. Building extensions is vastly easier and faster because of the comprehensive new API. The simplified user interface eliminates unnecessary clicks and context changes for site administrators and managers. Support for extended character sets, right to left languages, and translation of all static text in the front end and the administrator allows enhanced internationalization and worldwide use. New options for use of layout overrides and template parameters give designers total control over the look and feel of sites.

While this release marks a major milestone in our history, it also marks a new beginning. The next phase offers the opportunity to bring together the code created, lessons learned, and momentum gained, to build something truly great. It took us tens of thousands of hours, thousands of revisions, and hundreds of people to get to this point. It has been a remarkable journey filled with fun, discovery, and enlightenment where everyone has something to offer and anyone can contribute. Come join in. Joomla! 1.5 Stable ushers in a new era for the project. 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. But, this is just the beginning; the Functional Overview outlines the differences between Joomla! 1.0 and Joomla! 1.5 in much greater detail.

Functional Overview

Installing, Upgrading and Migrating

Because this is the first release after a massive code overhaul we fully expect issues to arise. For those people interested in migrating from Joomla! 1.0 please note that this is a continuously evolving process and is likely to be refined and optimized heavily over the next few weeks as feedback is received. There is no immediate need for people to migrate existing Joomla! 1.0 sites to 1.5 so please be patient as we do our best to make the migration process as smooth as possible for the myriad of configurations possible. Even if you don't plan to migrate your site in the near future we strongly encourage you to take Joomla! 1.5 for a test drive.

Fresh Installation

Upgrade Instructions
From Joomla! 1.5 RC4

Migration Instructions
From Joomla! 1.0.x

But wait... There is more

Something new in the Joomla! Shop Before you get started on your new Joomla! 1.5 website, you better have something great to wear!

For a while, Joomla! women have had three attractive choices: a T-shirt , tank top and a fleece jacket. Now, Joomla! men will also have choices beyond the standard T-shirt . Check out the new sport shirt, polo shirt and sport jacket. Plus, there is a fitted cap and a cool laptop bag.

So, grab a copy of Joomla! and outfit yourself with some cool Joomla! gear. Help spread the word that Joomla! 1.5 is available for anyone in the world.

Congratulations to JoomlArt

There is one other very special announcement we want to make. Last fall, Joomla! announced a Template Contest and called out to community designers requesting submissions from anyone interested. There were nearly 30 templates submitted that are now available for the community's use.

Early in January, the five finalists were announced and the community was invited to select their favourite template. Over 50% of the votes went to JA Purity, a template developed by JoomlArt.

Thanks to each of you for entering the contest and for freely sharing your work. Special congratulations to JoomlArt for this amazing submission. To see the templates, visit the Joomla! 1.5 Template Contest board.
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