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! 

The learning curve for Joomla is still steeper than it should be - especially since a lot of documentation for Joomla 1.5 is still being written.  Also, a lot of great knowledge - in fact, what I deem to be the *best* stuff to read in order to learn how to best use this great CMS, is on the forums... which means that if your eyes bug-out from staring at a screen too much you might have to settle for the printed word.

I just got news of a little site which lists some books about Joomla in one place, with links to buy em on Amazon.  Of course, you could simply pop over to amazon.com and search for Joomla but hey, whatever floats your boat.  Worth a peek: http://www.joomlabooks.net/

In case you haven't heard already, I thought I'd drop word on the official hunt going on for a new default Joomla template.

This is really exciting stuff - and an excellent chance for any designers working with Joomla.  The default template which comes with a CMS is so important in both being flexible and easy-to-use; the best default template would be a cinch to alter and transform whilst letting first-time users of Joomla get familiar with its functions and purpose.

So, get all the details on the competition from http://joomla.org/ - basically, the deadline's September 22 and if you win, your template will be included with the millions of downloads of Joomla 1.5 Stable... pretty groovy (asides from bragging rights and geeky fame there's a goody bag of prizes up for grabs as well).

Good luck! 

Something I've always felt limited by with Content Management Systems - Joomla included, is having to create navigation through menu systems... you know, sometime a 'page' is something more than just a bunch of media about one topic - often i find myself wanting to add some depth to content pages with additional navigation that's embedded into the content.

A little while back I discovered a nifty extension called Tabs and Slides (from the goodfellows over @ Joomla Works) - its a plugin which affords you this groovy functionality and lets you style the embedded links with CSS, which is always smart. :) 

Check out what it does:

Lovely stuff eh?  Note: this plugin also lets you keep your SEO a little tidier as crawlers like Google will see all the content on this page; so you don't have to worry about people hitting up your site and arriving at a non-primary page and then having to back-track through conventional navigation.... Also, with this method you can also introduce menus - adding copy above the menu itself like 'choose a type of chicken from the selections below.'

Quick rant time - we're putting together a fairly large site in Drupal 5.x at the moment which has a bunch of menus. 

Most Open Source CMS' (incl both Drupal and Joomla) allow you to setup blog and list displays of content - which really aide in keeping the number of menu items down, but sometimes an aesthetic will require you to build out many menus - which can be confusing and time-taking to manage.

This is a prime situation which exemplifies simple but important differences between CMS' - Joomla's menu management system is a bit quirky because of ItemIDs and theme association but its waaaaay simpler to manage menu items in Joomla than Drupal because of the listed-view approach on the admin side, which allows you to select multiple items, delete them or move them to another menu in a bunch and assign access permissions - all things that Drupal's stock menu module don't afford.

Again - simple but so important!  Okay, I'm off to delete 30-odd menu items individually on this Drupal site now :( ...