Oh boy, its here, its finally here Joomla 1.6. Wait, no its not, not yet. We have alpha, not even beta. We need to get to stable before I go spraying that Joomla 1.6 is here.

Anyways, I am going to be running an installation and a few runs on this Alpha to see if I can get a glimpse of whats to come. If you need a link to the alpha register and send me a PM.

Tried the Joomla 1.6 Alpha.

Heres my pros-
1- Joomla was a breeze to install like prior versions, same screens, same information being asked for. From my perspective all installation steps are the exact same.
2- Nice looking admin panel. Very similar to old style, with a little bit of a color difference. Most if not all the icons have been changed out for cleaner looking ones.
3- Redirect- Under "Components" in admin panel, you can see a "Redirect" Option. When you have a broken link, you just set up a redirection! Right inside admin panel.
4- Help Tab has been clearly expanded- Now you can link right to forums, security center, and even the resource directory! Good for you Resource Directory Providers!
5- Yeah, seen the access control options, pretty sick looking, I won't get into this much as I will explain my cons now-

CONS-
These cons are to be understood as development milestones that are still being addressed by the Joomla Development Team. In other words, these errors are to be expected up until the STABLE release package and I perfectly understand that as such and hold no qualms with Joomla. Good job team!

1- Still have a few "errors" when navigating around a bit. Especially when I was in redirect area and tried to exit out. 1. CREATE NEW REDIRECT- 2. CANCEL=

"Illegal variable _files or _env or _get or _post or _cookie or _server or _session or globals passed to script."

2- Front end styling still needs work accepting the new code, maybe a new template all together would work.

Since I started looking at this, Joomla has released another version of Alpha, that I will test out as well.