Joomla! makes it easy to launch a Web site of any kind. Whether you want a brochure site or you are building a large online community, Joomla! allows you to deploy a new site in minutes and add extra functionality as you need it. The hundreds of available Extensions will help to expand your site and allow you to deliver new services that extend your reach into the Internet.

The one thing about a Web site, it always changes! Joomla! makes it easy to add Articles, content, images, videos, and more. Site administrators can edit and manage content 'in-context' by clicking the 'Edit' link. Webmasters can also edit content through a graphical Control Panel that gives you complete control over your site.

No you don't. Versions of MySQL lower than 4.1 do not have built in UTF-8 support. However, Joomla! 1.5 has made provisions for backward compatibility and is able to use UTF-8 on older databases. Let the installer take care of all the settings and there is no need to make any changes to the database (charset, collation, or any other).

The FTP Layer allows file operations (such as installing Extensions or updating the main configuration file) without having to make all the folders and files writable. This has been an issue on Linux and other Unix based platforms in respect of file permissions. This makes the site admin's life a lot easier and increases security of the site.You can check the write status of relevent folders by going to ''Help->System Info" and then in the sub-menu to "Directory Permissions". With the FTP Layer enabled even if all directories are red, Joomla! will operate smoothly.NOTE: the [...]

This is now implemented by inserting a Read more... tag (the button is located below the editor area) a dotted line appears in the edited text showing the split location for the Read more.... A new Plugin takes care of the rest.It is worth mentioning that this does not have a negative effect on migrated data from older sites. The new implementation is fully backward compatible.

Yes it can! This is a significant security improvement.The safe mode limits PHP to be able to perform actions only on files/folders who's owner is the same as PHP is currently using (this is usually 'apache'). As files normally are created either by the Joomla! application or by FTP access, the combination of PHP file actions and the FTP Layer allows Joomla! to operate in PHP Safe Mode.

Well... how about never needing to mess with encoding settings again?Ever needed to display several languages on one page or site and something always came up in Giberish?With utf-8 (a variant of Unicode) glyphs (character forms) of basically all languages can be displayed with one single encoding setting.

Joomla! 1.5 does not provide an upgrade path from earlier versions. Converting an older site to a Joomla! 1.5 site requires creation of a new empty site using Joomla! 1.5 and then populating the new site with the content from the old site. This migration of content is not a one-to-one process and involves conversions and modifications to the content dump.

There are two ways to perform the migration:

The Joomla Core Team and Working Group members are volunteer developers, designers, administrators and managers who have worked together to take Joomla! to new heights in its relatively short life. Joomla! has some wonderfully talented people taking Open Source concepts to the forefront of industry standards. Joomla! 1.5 is a major leap forward and represents the most exciting Joomla! release in the history of the project.

The Joomla! team has millions of good reasons to be smiling about the Joomla! 1.5. In its current incarnation, it's had millions of downloads, taking it to an unprecedented level of popularity. The new code base is almost an entire re-factor of the old code base. The user experience is still extremely slick but for developers the API is a dream. A proper framework for real PHP architects seeking the best of the best.If you're a former Mambo User or a 1.0 series Joomla! User, 1.5 is the future of CMSs for a number of [...]