This is the anticipated new Joomla version that will fix tons of bugs that exist in Joomla current version.  These bugs aren’t show stopping, of course many sites run off of versions Joomla 1.5 or less.  As of Nov 2010, Joomla 1.6 Beta 13 was made available to the public.  I’ve downloaded it, but it’s not for any production site.  It’s made simply for your testing and evaluation.    So far the Joomla development team have made over 80 issues in the defect tracking ranging from Joomla extension design, the Joomla administrator panel, better management for deleted items, better user and security management, nested categories, improvements to the Menu Manager and a lot more.

To give you an idea of some of the fixes made, here are just a few that will make a change in the way you manage your Joomla site:

• Extensions must be Joomla 1.6 native- no legacy mode available
• Added a new “Save & Copy” button to items to easily copy from one to another.
• Users are not allowed to be placed in multiple groups
• Ability to manage the ACL of each group down to the actions permitted
• Nested categories management is available for each Joomla core component
• Can do batch changes to the Menu Manager
• A new redirect component geared towards helping you manage 404 error messages and optionally assign permanent page redirects.
• Provide registration failed message when user registers with an invalid email address

There are many more feature updates that will be provided in the new Joomla 1.6 release.  You can test drive the Joomla 1.6 beta versions by downloading it from the Joomla.org.   I’m crossing my fingers that the Joomla 1.6 complete version will be available soon.  On their page it says the Joomla 1.6 Release Candidate will be available Nov 15, 2010.   Sit tight folks!