Joomla! core developer Mitch Pirtle takes you through a quick tour of the advancements in the latest update to the award winning content management system.

The 1.5 release of Joomla! includes some significant changes, as well as some welcome additions to functionality to ease the lives of third party developers for product development and custom work. Not only has the interface been simplified for the end user, the API has been rationalized for the developer. More importantly, this version is a lot more suited for complex applications and sophisticated requirements. This is an excellent platform for integrating systems, for example, and taking on other enterprise-scale challenges.

This article outlines and demonstrates some of the most important improvements in Joomla!, from a developer perspective.

You can download the free PDF of the article from their site, and while you're there, check out this month's issue with stories/articles on XSLT, XUL & PHP, database abstraction, and aspect-oriented software development.

Some of the topics touched on this week include:

• the "Five Best Next Generation PHP Frameworks" article
• "The Evolution of PHP on the Internet" - Nexen.net's latest stats
• comparing mod_php and FastCGI
• the announcement of "Baking Day" from the CakePHP group
• and several of the new PEAR/PECL/Zend Framework updates from the week

Of course, this list only touches briefly on all of the happenings this week, so check out the full list on their site.

• PHP From the Shop Floor - Using PHP and Agile Development for Medical Management Software by Elizabeth Naramore
• Good Things Come In Small Packages - Harnessing the PHP and SQLite Combo by Jason Gilmore
• Building a Simple AJAX Application - Learning to use AJAX together with PHP from Thomas Myer

And the cover story, "How to Be an Above Average PHP Code Jockey" from Nathan A. Good and much more. As always, you can grab this latest copy directly from their site in an easy PDF download. A single issue is priced at 4 Euro (about $5.13 USD) and the entire year's subscription is only 42 Euro (about $53.82 USD). Get your copy today and get in on some of the best monthly PHP content in the PHP community!