Joomla! 1.7 - Separate Joomla Platform and CMS

One of the major goals of Joomla 1.7 was to separate the Joomla Platform, that is the engine upon which the Joomla CMS runs, into it's own product.

The new Joomla Platform includes many new features that will be of interest to developers.

In addition to the new Joomla Platform, the following new features have been added:

Add support to log deprecated API
JToolBarHelper functions for Save and Create New and Save as Copy
Mod_custom with backgroundimages
Allow preselection of categories in com_content
Add JFormRuleOptions rule to validate type="list" parameters
Make copy/move consistent across components
Update TinyMCE to version 3.4
New parameters are present for the language switcher
Translation teams can now include a css file in their admin pack to change the fonts used in back-end
Language manager now displays installed language in tabs
Improve the installation
Make single contact view ready to use dynamic forms
JToolBar cleanup for Save and Create New and Save as Copy
Add ability to save a search in a menu item
Mass Mail - exclude disabled user
Add PHP and HTML modes to CodeMirror
JModelList casts $query to string unnecessarily making it impossible to implement Joomfish
Add to debug log information component and module start time and memory use when showing
View Access Level not testing in Administrator Models
Add support for OpenSearch to com_search
Automatic DB update
Add WAI-ARIA and HTML5 support the progressbar.js
Make loadmodule plugin more useful
"Select a Menu Item Type" in modal box in menu item edit page
Add to debug log information component and module start time and memory use when showing
Association between menu items in multilingual settings
Add an ordering column to table jos_languages