For anyone who missed the J blog...

We discussed 1.6 a "lot". What we resolve was that there would be a single
"alpha" stage. The following is a list of what we resolved would form the
alpha, and if not finished, would prevent the alpha from being released.
These features are:

- The Access Control system needs to at least emulate what is in 1.5,
allow adding of new groups and access levels, and allow you to set new
"view" rules for at least articles.
- Implement a new JForm
- Implement and standardise several new triggers
- Implements a Javascript translation system
- Implement new controller dispatchers
- Implement a JContent class that will be used by onPrepareContent
plugins and views
- Upgrade to Mootools 1.2
- Finish the new extension updater work

After we release the alpha, each beta release will be time-boxed (we hope
that not more than four are required). The following is a list of the
features highly desired for the final distribution. Each features need to
be "ready" in order to be included in each beta release. Some of these
features will make it in the alpha, but will not prevent the alpha being
release if they are not ready. Overall though, we will need significant
help from the Joomla development community to pull all these features
together:

- Implement unlimited depth categories (but not multi-mapping)
- Refactor the user management system and make it more extensible (eg,
allow customer user fields)
- Implement a comments system (including pings and trackbacks)
- Implement queue redirects (allows you to, for example, return to the
previous page you were on after you edit something)
- Refactor parameters and make them more extensible (for example, plugins
could allow you to add additional custom parameters to articles)
- Finish MVC-ing the Administrator components (we need lots of help here)
- Implement Captcha helpers for any form
- Implement systems whereby external authentication systems, such as
LDAP, can map to our new Joomla user groups
- Reimplement the ability to select multiple categories for some views in
com_content (was in 1.0, got dropped in 1.5 for some unknown reason)
- Implement a database driven installation log
- Refactor JError
- Examine the PDF generation system in detail and see if we can make it
work properly (otherwise we will look at dropping it if we can't make it
work well)
- Localise the Invalid Token messages
- Drop the Polls component because the quality of that extension is
pretty bad and there are much better third-part alternatives available
- Convert all layouts to symmantic and XHTML Strict
- Convert of ini-based "params" fields to use JSON instead of INI format
(huge technical and performance improvements). Note, the language files
will remain in INI format.

source: Wilco Jansen here
groups.google.com/group/joomla-dev-gener...a2893db0d12?hl=en-GB

You can join this group and keep in the current of news.