What features are new in Joomla 2.5?

Productivity improvements

Lots of improvements to menus and toolbars make Joomla 2.5 easier and quicker to use.  

Presentation of menus is more consistent and menus have a number of shortcut links.  

Toolbars have new "Save & New" options which speed up the editing process whencrewating new content.  

When logged into the Control Panel, if your session expires, when you log back in you will be returned to the screen you were on before.

Feature consistency

Many of the features in each component have been standardised making your choice of parameters when working in different components much more familiar.

Nested categories

Sections and categories have been merged into one list of categories. No more sections! And there is now no limit to the depth to which you can build category trees (i.e. categories within categories within categories and so on).  

User groups

User groups can now be customised. Administrators can put registered users in more than one user group.

New user permissions

The old 'fixed' permissions of Joomla! 1.5 have been replaced by four different layers of permissions, allowing administrators to control who can create, edit, publish and delete specific content, right down to an individual Article.

Neat but very complicated to set up and get it how you want it!

Custom view access levels

Administrators can now restrict particular groups of registered users to seeing only particular categories of content, and even individual articles.

Again, very neat but very complicated to set up and get it how you want it!

Module enhancements

Modules now be easily set to display on all pages except those selected - a very useful option when assigning modules to menu links.  

As with Articles you can specify publish and unpublish times and dates.

Article-based modules (example, newsflash modules) work with the new nested categories system.

SEO improvements

SEO is now even easier in Joomla 2.5.  

Meta information can be added to Categories as well as Articles.

Article page title and page heading can be separately managed.

Multi-language support

Joomla 2.5 enables you to prepare sets of content for different languages, giving the site visitor the choice to switch between them.

Administrator template selectability

Administrator users can select which administrator template they wish to use.  

This is a bonus for organisations working with people with differing accessibility needs.

Integrated trash management

All content - inclusing modules - is now trashed before you can permanently delete it.

The trash manager is also integrated across the Control Panel.

Extension installer improvements

Administrators can more easily upgrade extensions en masse at the click of a button, this includes upgrading the Joomla! release being used!

Error 404 redirection

There is a new plugin which enables administrators to monitor 404 Error pages and store information about them. Administrators can set these 404 Error pages to permanently redirect to another page. Great news if you are always moving content around and wish to avoid undermining your SEO with broken back-links!

Semantic HTML markup

All the old table-based HTML has been replaced by CSS, meaning improved SEO and accessibility!