There has been a lot of interest, requests and concern regarding the current status of JCE 1.5, and in particluar the Image Manager Extended plugin. I haven't been too good about communicating the status and progress of the project recently, and for this I apologise. Rest assured, JCE 1.5.0 is alive and very well, and a release is imminent. It will also feature one of the most important feature updates to JCE yet, (inspired by conversations at the Dutch Joomla!day) JCE Groups!
Image Manager Extended
Creating this plugin for JCE 1.5.0 has been quite a lot more work than anticipated, and has required some extensive modifications to the JCE 'API', mainly the inclusion of an event systems to trigger actions after events, eg: onUpload, onFileDelete etc. to handle Image Manager Ext thumbnail and resize operations without having to duplicate existing functions used by all the Manager plugins. For example, after a successful file upload, the onUpload event is triggered which in the Image Manager Ext's case calling an onUpload function to do the resizing, rotating (yes, rotating of images has been added!) and thumbnailing to the uploaded file. A similar thing happens onFileDelete to delete the associated thumbnail and possibly thumbnail folder.
Image rotating has also been added, and is available in the Upload dialog, (see screenshot popup) as well as in the Transform dialog (which includes resizing).
There have been one or two minor improvements too, such as the ability to have rollover images and tooltips at the same time, as well as some general fixes and improvements to the Manager plugins code in general.
The Image Manager Extended will be released as beta 1
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JCE 1.5.0 beta 4 and JCE Groups
Included in the next JCE 1.5.0 beta 4 and JCE Admin Component RC 3 will be the new Groups system. This is a major change to the way permissions are handled in JCE and presents what is essentially the ability to create individual user and/or user type profiles, each have a unique layout and button configuration, as well as specific editor and plugin parameters. Groups can contain a mix of user types and individual users.
For example, you can create a group for Authors which only has access to Bold, Italic, Underline and the Image Manager. You then set the Image Manager to be restricted to a folder with the groups name, as well as disabling file and folder deleting, set via the plugin's group parameters. For this group you also disable the ability to insert javascript and php code (via the group's editor parameters), and just for good measure, add the user Joe Schmo to this group, because despit the fact he is an Editor, he just no ready for all the features you have assigned to your Editor group.
A default group exists for all default editing user types (which can be edited). Super Administrators have access to everything (always, regardless of what group they are assigned to), and Guests and Registered users are not in any group by default and are therefore presented with a blank editor (you can change this by assigning them to a group or creating a new one).
Here are a couple of screenshots of the JCE Groups Admin.
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Expect a release this coming week. Guaranteed.