Download your copy of Joomla! 1.5 BETA

Exactly one year after the Mambo / Joomla! split, open source CMS enthusiasts from the world over can finally download their very own copy of Joomla’s colossal milestone release, the 1.5 BETA.

While the beta review process is furiously underway and the community is pouring in the “bug reports” and questions of all sorts, early reviewers are amazed at how well this CMS has evolved into a simpler and arguably more effective package to publish all sorts of information (from personal sites to full-blown commercial sites).

A big round of applauds goes to all the Joomla! developers but especially to lead developer Johan Janssens who said that October 12th, 2006 is a giant step for the Joomlasphere! (notice the brand new term).

Johan Janssens went on to say: “Open source projects are delivering incredible power and features to end users — we’ve taken things a step further by building an opportunity for unlimited extendibility for developers,”.

He also added: “Once developers get to see how easily 1.5 can leverage their own ideas as plugins, they will certainly be a big part of continuing Joomla’s incredible growth. You only need to take a look at the Joomlasphere to understand how amazing the future can be.”

Here, at Beep.Name, we have no doubt that the future for Joomla! will be downright amazing.

You’re invited to consider the following basic facts about the (buzzword, again) Joomlasphere to see how -big- this is getting:

• More than 60,000 registered users on the Official Joomla! community site forum and more on the many international community sites.
• 1168 Projects on the Joomla! Forge (forge.joomla.org). All for open source addons by third party developers.
• 890+ extensions for Joomla! registered on the Extension site (extensions.joomla.org)
• Joomla.org exceeds 2 TB of traffic per month!
• Alexa report [October 2006]: Joomla.org at #492 of top 500 busiest websites in the world.
• Community forums, over half a million posts, and 60,000 activated users. Growing at over 1200 posts per day and 150 new partcipants each day!

With this in mind, you should allow yourself some “beta exploration time” and download your very own copy of the Joomla! 1.5 BETA release.

Yes, it’s free (for those who are somewhat new to “open source”).

Some developers are hoping for a solid “Release Candidate” version before Christmas 2006 and you’re advised -not- to run a “live site” with this BETA (although some of you will try it anyway, as usual).

The enthusiasm is so high that a forum member has suggested that the “Stable Release”, once it becomes available, be called “2.0″, instead of the planned “1.5″. It gives an idea how big a step this release is, compared the (still current) 1.x version.

The language translation work is currently underway and a whole lot of extensions should get upgraded in the coming months, not to mention the available templates, namely those from RocketTheme (arguably the prettiest).

Tags: joomla 1.5 beta, free cms, open source, content management, web sites

One Response to “Download your copy of Joomla! 1.5 BETA”

1. Amy Stephen says:

   October 13, 2006 at 9:50 am

   Nice site! Excellent article. It would be appreciated if you shared who you are! Thanks for this – especially for the *sweet* write up on Joomla!