Hi everyone. This is the first of what we hope will be regular blogs to let you know what the Production Leadership Team is working on. In case you missed it, we're the people who coordinate the development, documentation, communications, bug squashing, and translation efforts for Joomla.

Currently, we are hard at work getting version 1.6 ready. To that end, we are meeting weekly to sort out tasks and keep things moving. You can read the notes from these meetings on the Google Group called Joomla! Production Working Group Leadership.

We have also begun work on a development budget for next year. We've created a thread on the Google Group where we will brainstorming ideas for the best ways to use our limited funds to further the Joomla development process. If you are interested, you can follow the discussion there.

We are also meeting regularly with the Version 1.6 Release Team. The largest task to complete before we can release 1.6 is the ACL asset management system. If you have been following the CMS Development Google Group, you know that people have been working very hard on the design for this. This process of brainstorming the design showed the Joomla community in action. The discussion was lively but cordial and many good ideas were contributed by a number of people. In the end, we were able to reach a clear consensus around a great design.

Hannes has posted a detailed description of the final design and some code here: http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-dev-cms/browse_thread/thread/883baaffe12f023.

Oh, and one last thing. Look for an official announcement about the upcoming version 1.6 alpha2 release soon.