The Joomla! Gang rode into town, sang, danced, drank beer - and impressed the heck out of us all along the way. Joomla! 1.5 (soon to go beta and [hopefully] a month later stable) is morphing from a kick-ass CMS into a kick-ass OO framework that's going to be a tremendous boost to the component author and user alike.

Mitch Pirtle, Louis Landry, Andy Miller and even Johan Janssens in Belgium (courtesy of Skype and strong coffee) walked through the latest news with Joomla! (the new developer portal, API documentation courtesy of phpdocumenter, and Joomla! Developer IRC). After a brief introduction to Joomla! and content management in general, Mitch and Louis jumped into the new 1.5 features:

• Full native UTF-8 support;
• Total refactoring of the joomla.php file into OO;
• Rationalized API naming;
• FTP client installer;
• Database driver capabilities (so far just mySQL and mySQLi);
• Tiered application architecture (similar to java packages);
• Registry class;
• Installer rewrite (OO);
• A plug-in replacement for mambots (via an observer class)
• A document class that can be extended to output html, xml, PDF, rss, xul...

For those who missed the presentation (or want a souvenir) you can Listen Now! to the audio - for the podcasters in the audience don't forget to subscribe to BostonPHP to ensure you get all future meetings downloaded automatically.

Thanks to the Joomla! team for stopping by. BostonPHP members interested in downloading the slidedeck can do so for pdf or flash.