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.

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.

The improved Installer can be found under the Extensions Menu. With versions prior to Joomla! 1.5 you needed to select a specific Extension type when you wanted to install it and use the Installer associated with it, with Joomla! 1.5 you just select the Extension you want to upload, and click on install. The Installer will do all the hard work for you.

In Joomla! versions prior to 1.5 there were separate processes for creating a Static Content Item and normal Content Items. The processes have been combined now and whilst both content types are still around they are renamed as Articles for Content Items and Uncategorized Articles for Static Content Items.

If you want to create a static item, create a new Article in the same way as for standard content and rather than relating this to a particular Section and Category just select Uncategorized as the option in the Section and Category drop down lists.

This is now defined in the Language [lang].xml file in the Language metadata settings. If you are having locale problems such as dates do not appear in your language for example, you might want to check/edit the entries in the locale tag. Note that multiple locale strings can be set and the host will usually accept the first one recognised.

Joomla! 1.5 does not provide an upgrade path from earlier versions. Converting an older site to a Joomla! 1.5 site requires creation of a new empty site using Joomla! 1.5 and then populating the new site with the content from the old site. This migration of content is not a one-to-one process and involves conversions and modifications to the content dump.

There are two ways to perform the migration:

When you Archive an Article, the content is put into a state which removes it from your site as published content. The Article is still available from within the Control Panel and can be retrieved for editing or republishing purposes. Trashed Articles are just one step from being permanently deleted but are still available until you Remove them from the Trash Manager. You should use Archive if you consider an Article important, but not current. Trash should be used when you want to delete the content entirely from your site and from future search results.

To completely remove an Article, select the Articles that you want to delete and move them to the Trash. Next, open the Article Trash in the Content Menu and select the Articles you want to delete. After deleting an Article, it is no longer available as it has been deleted from the database and it is not possible to undo this operation.

Well you are reading it right now! This depends on what you want to achieve. If you are new to Joomla! and have no clue how it all fits together, just install the sample data. If you don't like the English sample data because you - for instance - speak Chinese, then leave it out.