It was great to present Joomla! 1.6 last month at JoomlaChicago in November. We had a full house on-hand to see the Alpha 2 release of Joomla! Included in the upcoming release will be two much-anticipated major improvements for Joomla: Nested Categories and Access Control Levels (ACL).  Along with these improvements, you'll find a new fine-grain Template controls, improved User Profiles, many enhancements to the code and rules to boost performance, and several needed usability enhancements.

The Joomla! leadership has gone through a lot of change within the past year, with Wilco Jansen and Anthony Ferrara (and others) no longer on the Dev team. After a re-org, others have stepped up, and now, OSM has turned to professional, paid support in order to get back on-track on the long-overdue 1.6.  

There's still no word on how challenging the upgrade path will be. Also, still no word on when two other major enhancements may be coming down the pike: Versioning and Multi-site (multi-domain) controls.

We'll keep our ear to the rail on these and other developments! As always, feel free to comment here and join the discussion.