Recently Joomla 1.6 Release Candidate had been announced. This is a milestone release for Joomla, meaning that at this point, no major new developments will be introduced, and it will be mostly fixing of bugs, and this means that Joomla 1.6 is stable.

So what the Joomla Community be doing at this point?

End users i.e. people who develop sites with Joomla, simply need to keep monitoring developments, possibly ask their webmasters what plans they have for Joomla 1.6. If there are specific features which you have been waiting for in Joomla 1.6, then keep a close eye. It is important to note that migration from 1.5 to 1.6 of core Joomla will be supported through an extenion (which is being developed), however the migration of extensions will be on a case by case basis.

On the other hand, developers need to start planning migration of their extensions to Joomla 1.6. The RC ensures that developers can test their extensions without expecting any major change which could "break" their development. All in all, the Release Candidate means that Joomla 1.6, although not fully ready for live sites, it means it is relatively stable, and we should be expecting an official Joomla 1.6 quite soon :)