What You Need to Know About Joomla 1.6. Part 5: Templates

Joomla 1.6 beta versions are out!

I, along with the rest of the Joomla! developer community, have been downloading and installing the new release and playing around with all the goodies.

The community is gearing up and squashing all those little annoying bugs and working on the help screens (Note: Documentation is extremely important! I was on the doc team for the 1.5 release and it's very rewarding - Get involved!).

Now that Joomla 1.6 Beta has arrived, it's time to take a look under the hood of the new Template Manager and examine the new features it has to offer.

I figured the best way to look at the differences between Joomla 1.6 Beta and Joomla 1.5 would be to compare those differences for you. So, let's get started!

[Template Manager] Joomla 1.5 vs Joomla 1.6 Beta

Joomla 1.5 Template Admin

Joomla 1.6 Beta Template Admin

So the biggest differences you'll see here is that Joomla 1.5 gives you two sub options: Site Templates and Admin Templates. Joomla 1.6 Beta is drastically different. Instead of site templates an admin templates, instead you'll find Styles, and Templates. This highlights a huge functional change in the way templates will operate in Joomla 1.6 in terms of customization. Joomla 1.6 handles front end vs backend handling by adding a location parameter.