The fine folks over at PHP Magazine have sent over a note today about a free download their offering of their latest cover story - Joomla! 1.5 - Knocking at Your Door (from the June 2006 issue).

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.