After just having a chat with my brother about the growth of Joomla usage, and overall size/scope of Joomla's user-base I came across the following screenshot which Johan posted on flickr :

Happy New Year everyone!

To those of you who have been wondering why this blog hasn't been posted to in so long, the answer is simple - I've been waiting for Joomla 1.5 to be ready to start talking about... I've been excited about this complete overhaul of Joomla for some months and have played with a few versions of the Beta release but until people could actually start using the software to make a website, I thought I'd keep my lips shut, or fingers from typing or.. whatever!

Alas, I'm tired of waiting to really play with 1.5 and am going to cross my fingers, hope that the core team gets this 4th Release Candidate sorted and has a stable release out there before February.  I'm rolling up my sleeves and going to take a look under the hood of this exciting software later today.

Let the blogging begin!!  Expect some posts through this week as I explore 1.5 and relay my observations on what's new and cool with it... 

http://www.joomlajobs.net

Originally launched towards the end of 2006, Joomlajobs was the result of us at Design Guru being fed up with all the junky bloated websites for posting jobs - both in situations where we needed subcontractors/freelancers for projects as well as when we where looking for work, it was just a headache - one that we were committed to making dissappear.

The plan was simple; create a really easy to use website that lets people post either long-term or short-term positions for project work. We called those 'jobs' and 'gigs' and set out to make the site using Joomla 1.0x and Mosets Tree - a 3rd party extension for directory listings used at J!ED, among other places. In addition to just posting listings, we also conceived a community developing around professional Joomla work and wanted to support it - so the original site used Community Builder as well.

Though we managed to build a decent site, after a few months or trying to redesign it using various other components, we couldn't avoid the fact that Joomla just wasn't the right platform for the site's functionality... which resulted in it being offline for a while. Well, it took a while to make the decision but we ended up completely building a new Joomlajobs from scratch using Drupal! Yes yes, many Joomla die-hards will balk at that but heck, at the end of the day we've made an extremely powerful listings site that's still Open Source, easy to use and modular; so we can add functionality in time as its community requires!

If you work with Joomla as a professional freelancer, development firm, designer, employer or anything else, make sure you pay a visit to http://www.joomlajobs.net and:

sign up for your free account ! :)

Together we can build a community of people committed to working well with Joomla! :)

Joomla 1.5RC2 is out and that means its nearly stable - according to the core team there's another Release Candidate expected soon and then the code should move to Stable status; meaning that we're likely a month or two away from finally considering J1.5 standard.

Until a Stable release is out, its worth downloading the latest RC and playing with it on a development server to get familiar with the differences - both in UI and Framework... for those of you who want to learn more about the Joomla API and how to get cracking developing components for it, Michel Bijliand is offering to take some folks under his wing ...

Also, I'm going to try and find time over the next 3 weeks or so and launch a series of posts introducing some cool new things you can do with Joomla 1.5! 

Nice to see so many people using Firefox to check out whyjoomla - here's the pie, grabbed from our Google Analytics report for February 2007:

As you may now know, Joomla  1.5 is now available in BETA .

This is great news and we recommend downloading it to install on a development server and explore all the cool new functionality plus improved admin interface - which is a whole lot simpler and easier on the eyes (less darting around the screen with more collapsable menus etc).

Exciting stuff: Johan Janssens, Joomla's lead developer, just announced in Bonn, Germany at German Joomla!Day that the development team's slated October 12th as the release date for Joomla 1.5 BETA.

 The new release has been eagerly awaited within the worldwide J! community as its code is completely re-written since the mambo days and will offer a brighter future for extensibility and standards compliance.

This being the first post, I'll be quick and just welcome everyone to whyjoomla? !  As this is the only blog we're maintaining at design guru, its been an exciting week preparing to launch because I finally get to blabber on about all the cool things you can do with joomla - my favourite CMS

Ah, and no first blog post would be complete without a bring-us-upto-speed post eh?  Here goes, some recent news for y'all...