Well, another idea from my second favorite Joomla! blog, Alledia. Everybody in the Joomla! community sees the specter of the highly anticipated Joomla 1.6 version on the horizon but not too many have gotten a chance to check it out in detail. I did that last night and was giddier than a high school girl that just got asked to prom by the quarterback. It has a ton of cool usability features for administrators, so if you spend a lot of time in the backend of your joomla site, listen up.
until now, there was no easy way to see what modules you had published to any given menu item
The number one thing that pissed me off as an administrator of countless Joomla! websites was the lack of a consistent workflow when adding menu items and assigning modules. Everybody with Joomla experience knows that you assign modules to pages through the menu items that link to those pages. You can also assign modules to all menu items at once, pick and choose from the list, or assign them to none at all. However, until now, there was no easy way to see exactly what modules you had published to any given menu item. What a joke! Sometimes you have modules that are published but hidden, sometimes they all look the same but have different data, and sometimes you just want to know what the name of that one module is so you can find it and edit it. No more!
The much improved Joomla 1.6 menu manager allows you to edit a menu item and see what modules are published to it in a simple list with information like the module title, position, other menu items it is published to, etc. And get this, it allows you to click the title of the module and edit it right in a popup window! This may seem like a small improvement but I know that it will forever change the workflow and theory behind setting up and maintaining a joomla site.
The next feature that I want to proclaim to the mountain-tops is the batch processing function in the menu manager. Before, you could select a bunch of menu items and publish them, unpublish, delete, and move. Now you can set their parent item and their access level with the same method. This will save a ton of time managing large sites and reorganizing large menu structures. But wait, there's more! The last nifty improvement in the menu manager is making it more like the module manager, where you can select the menus that show up from a select list right above the table of items instead of having to navigate through the admin menu. You can also do this with menu type, access level, and state (like 1.5 allows).
Doctor's Orders
Again (and I find myself saying this pretty often), I could go on forever but will save some of the other features for future posts. If you do nothing else, download the latest alpha release and install it somewhere, anywhere. Browse through it, get excited about the features I have talked about above, and let me know what you think. Joomla 1.6 will change backend administration forever.
Jesse Dundon is a founding partner at Hathway Tech, where he is responsible for project management, training, and overall business strategy. He is a graduate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, avid rugby player, and a true scholar of Joomla! and web development in general.
