The Menu Manager in Joomla! 1.5 did the job, but there was certainly some room for improvement. Joomla! 1.6 offers a fully overhauled Menu Manager. Just to see why this is a good thing and what's been added, let's have a very brief look at what the old menu manager looked like. Here's the old Menu Manager screen:
It was a really basic setup—but it didn't function as anyone new to Joomla! would expect. If you'd click any of the menu names in the Menu Manager in order to edit the menu links, you'd end up in the wrong screen:
No Joomla!, we didn't want to change the Unique Name or any other internal references to the menu! There must be many, many Joomla! users who had to learn the hard way that in order to edit the menu contents, they actually had to click an inconspicuous little icon in the Menu Item(s) column. In the new release, those days of Menu Manager usability disasters are finally over!