Joomla! CMS 1.7 released with focus on enhanced security

Today marks the official release of Joomla! 1.7. One of the world's most popular open source content management systems, Joomla! has continued to grow in popularity since first branching from Mambo many years ago.

One of the most common criticisms people make when speaking about Joomla! are jabs at its security model, which some consider weak. In all fairness to the Joomla! developers, I think that when you are as popular and widely used as Joomla!, you're going to be prone to more attempts to hack than say, a less popular CMS. In response to some of these concerns, there has been a lot of focus on security improvements within the CMS of late and this release is no exception to the rule.

That, however, is not all this new release brings. There are a number of exciting new additions. Key updates in the new version include pre-defined search options, a new defense against form manipulation, language specific font settings and more. In addition, the entire Joomla open source community overhauled 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 to this version include:

• One Click Version Updating – Update a site to the latest stable Joomla release with just a click. The new built-in updater also handles updates for Joomla and Joomla extensions. This is a major enhancement improving upon the previous system of manually updating individual files on the server.
• Six-Month Release Cycle – A shorter development cycle that will enhance Joomla’s stability by providing more core feature development and adoption. Short-term releases will be in active development for six months, then reach the end-of-life one month after the next version’s release. Long-term support will be active for 15 months, starting with Joomla version 1.8. Version 1.7 will have a support cycle of seven months.
• Joomla Platform Split – The platform (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 also allow the user community to be more strongly aligned with particular development groups, which will result in more effective and quality development.

A True Open Source Community

The development of 1.7 is a true collaboration by thousands of Joomla developers and millions of everyday users that have downloaded the CMS to date since the Joomla community does not rely on contributions from large software development companies. This includes feedback gathered from more than 2.3 million Joomla forum posts, 490,000 Joomla forum members and data from more than 7,900 Joomla extensions. Since 2007, Joomla has been downloaded more than 24 million times, making it by
far, the most popular and downloaded open source website software in the world today.

Joomla is used for everything from small personal websites to the backend management for some of the largest enterprises and highest traffic sites on the Web, including sites operated by Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald’s, Sony, many large nations and more.

Additional Features Included:

• Better example code for different plug-in types. This enables developers to more easily build custom extensions.
• The ability to automatically validate form data against a list of options during the save operation. This makes it easier to protect against hackers manipulating forms and trying to save invalid data.
• Enables the submit article form to automatically set the article category. This makes it easier for site administrators to restrict users to a specific category meaning content isn’t accidentally added to the incorrect page on a website.
• Multilanguage improvements allows developers/administrators to associate menu items in different languages for faster navigation. Language packs can now also be built to automatically select the best font for that language for the administrative back end.

Visit http://www.joomla.org to download Joomla 1.7 today