Mambots have been renamed as Plugins.

Mambots were introduced in Mambo and offered possibilities to add plug-in logic to your site mainly for the purpose of manipulating content. In Joomla! 1.5, Plugins will now have much broader capabilities than Mambots. Plugins are able to extend functionality at the framework layer as well.

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.

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 FTP layer is not required on a Windows host/server.

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.

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).

Joomla! runs on the PHP pre-processor. PHP comes in many flavours, for a lot of operating systems. Beside PHP you will need a Web server. Joomla! is optimized for the Apache Web server, but it can run on different Web servers like Microsoft IIS it just requires additional configuration of PHP and MySQL. Joomla! also depends on a database, for this currently you can only use MySQL.

Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache Web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP, WAMP, and MAMP are easy to install distributions containing Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl for the Windows, Mac OSX and Linux operating systems. These packages are for localhost installations on non-public servers only.
The minimum version requirements are:

• Apache 1.x or 2.x
• PHP 4.3 or up
• MySQL 3.23 or up

For the latest minimum requirements details, see Joomla! Technical Requirements.

Installing of Joomla! 1.5 is pretty easy. We assume you have set-up your Web site, and it is accessible with your browser.

Download Joomla! 1.5, unzip it and upload/copy the files into the directory you Web site points to, fire up your browser and enter your Web site address and the installation will start.

For full details on the installation processes check out the Installation Manual on the Joomla! Help Site where you will also find download instructions for a PDF version too.

Most Articles will be assigned to a Section and Category. In many cases, you might not know where you want it to appear so put the Article in the Uncategorized Section/Category. The Articles marked as Uncategorized are handled as static content.

You indeed can change the Menu Item's Type to whatever you want, even after they have been created.

If, for instance, you want to change the Blog Section of a Menu link, go to the Control Panel->Menus Menu->[menuname]->Menu Item Manager and edit the Menu Item. Select the Change Type button and choose the new style of Menu Item Type from the available list. Thereafter, alter the Details and Parameters to reconfigure the display for the new selection as you require it.

General

In Joomla! 1.5 all User interfaces can be localised. This includes the installation, the Back-end Control Panel and the Front-end Site.

The core release of Joomla! 1.5 is shipped with multiple language choices in the installation but, other than English (the default), languages for the Site and Administration interfaces need to be added after installation. Links to such language packs exist below.