The July issue of the Joomla! Community  magazine has been published. This month’s features include a look at the CMS from an outsider’s viewpoint, and a sneak peek at version 1.7, which will be released on July 17.

This issue marks the first anniversary of the magazine, and editor Paul Orwig is proud of the achievements over the last year, including winning two J.O.S.C.A.R. awards, one for Best Community Website and the other for Innovation of the Year.

The Joomla Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition awards were new last year, and winners are decided by a Jury consisting of Joomla! developers, designers, trainers, authors and site builders, alongside members of various Joomla! teams and people from across 6 continents.

The outsider’s view of Joomla! takes the form of a Q&A session. The idea for the article arose from interaction with a reader and the thought that it might be nice to get a fresh set of eyes and perspective on the code, community, and software that author Chad Windnagle had fallen in love with.

If you’re wondering what will be new in Joomla! 1.7, there are some minor changes but this is mainly a short-term release, ahead of the major update in January 2012. One change is the reintroduction of support for batch processing, which is covered elsewhere in the mag. More importantly, the article on Joomla! 1.7 includes details of Joomla! Platform 11.2, which is being released today. This, according to Hagen Graf, will change the way developers, architects and service providers deal with Joomla! in the future. He points out that the first major advantage of Platform 11.2 is that it allows developers to use the Joomla Platform independently of the CMS. , so you’ll be able to choose a different CMS to use on top of the Joomla! platform if you want. The core CMS will still be included, though.

Another advantage of the separation is the ability it gives for developers to add features more quickly. Graf says that with the Joomla! platform stored on GitHub it is very easy to fork it for your own purpose and it is easy too to integrate your code in the main branch.

Other articles in the issue cover the reintroduced batch processing abilities of Joomla! 1.7, and the second part of a short series on navigating the code development process, along with columns and events.

For the rest of the contents of this and previous issues, go to the Joomla! Community Magazine website.