• Student: "What's going on with Joomla 1.6?"
• Steve: "User management is going to get more sophisticated, you won't be restricted to sections and categories for articles any more."
• Student: "OK, but these guys are volunteers, right? How much have they got done? When can I see what it'll look like?"
• Steve: "Errrrrr ..... ummmm ...... when I get back I'll take some screenshots of the current Alpha version and write a blog about it."

New Article Manager

• No more sections and categories. You can have as many levels of categories as you wish.
• "Frontpage" has been replaced with "Featured" and removed from its own "Frontpage Manager".
• Articles is currently under the "Components" menu link. Technically it is com_content, so that makes sense.

New User Groups

• No more public / registered / special limitations
• You can create groups and then assign them to different levels
• The levels will control what users can and cannot do.

New User Manager

• Almost the same as before, plus the ability to assign the user to custom groups.

New Menu Manager

• All of the menu items are in one long list.

New Extension Installer

• All of the extensions are listed together under "Manage" regardless of whether they're components or plugins.
• "Update" will allow the installation of extension improvements without needing to uninstall and re-install