Joomla! lead developer Johan Janssens announced the official Joomla! 1.5 Beta release date at the German Joomla! Day, in Bonn, today. The announcement marks the most significant milestone in Joomla's short history. "We've decided to release on the 12th of October — exactly one year since we wrote our first line of Joomla! code," Johan said.

The goals for the Joomla! 1.5 release are to:

• Substantially improve usability, manageability, and scalability far beyond the original Mambo foundations.

• Expand accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

• Extend the integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

• Enhance the content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.

• Achieve a more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.

• Deliver backwards compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

More info here