Its kind of long, and a little boring, but if you have time and are interested in finding out what people want Joomla to become, check out the wrap-up notes developers attending the 2009 Joomla Developers Conference in NYC recently shared:

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Not so long ago a previous update was released for Joomla 1.5; I mentioned that updating your 1.5 site was pretty easy and well, its time to do it again.  Joomla 1.5.7 was announced as a security update some days back and I thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't heard the news... 

Note: its great to see how quickly reported issues with Joomla are being solved by the core team and everyone contributing to the project!  With each release comes fixes as well as improvements to Joomla - expect an updated OpenID library, upgraded TinyMCE, better menu handling and more with Jooma 1.5.8

Incase you didn't catch the heads-up on joomla.org yesterday - a new security patch for and full version of Joomla 1.5x has been released.

Apparently a bug in 1.5.5 was allowing unscrupulous fellows to change people's login passwords... which is quite a big deal in my book.  Typically the error is reported to leave the main site admin account open to editing!  You can read more on this issue in the Joomla Developer Blog .

Security bugs are always a little scary but one thing to note with Joomla in general is that the loopholes always get closed very quickly - in fact, when you cruise through the Joomla forums its hard to find many posts reporting sites being hacked due to security flaws in Joomla core. 

I recommend upgrading your Joomla 1.5.x site immediately to 1.5.6 - there are simple patches available on joomlacode.org (scroll down to the 1.5.6 upgrades section) which you can download and just upload on top of your current install; a process which takes just a couple of minutes. 

I've been posting sporadically to this blog for some time now, and we've been lucky to attract a few thousand people per month.  I generally advocate that a site's success doesn't solely reside in Google Analytics but instead, mainly in the feel of community participation it relays to people when they spend time on it.   In that respect, things are going well here - you guys post comments here and there fairly regularly and old threads are always being picked up for debate.

When I launched the blog I sought to answer its title question through the anecdotes and ponderings I was going to post to it.  Though, in the past few months - with Joomla 1.5 being released and a whole stack of new extensions being released for it, I'm still curious to hear why you - the Joomla community at large, choose to use it as your platform of choice for building websites.

So - please feel free to be as candid as you'd like, post a comment below to answer the simple question...

... Why Joomla ? 

A few years ago we created a site called JoomlaFeed - our mission was to create an online space where people interested in Joomla could catch up on news from across the Web; including snippets from the Core Team as well as extension developers, community advocates and a host of others.

The site's been successful in so far as having a number of people subscribe to its aggregated RSS feeds as well as visit joomlafeed.com regularly but I think it can do more.

So, we're taking the occasion for rebuilding JoomlaFeed in Joomla 1.5 as an opportunity to see what you all think of the site and would like from it.

Please visit http://www.joomlafeed.com and post your comments! (There's a link at the top of the site)

I just came across a site running Joomla thats been setup for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Orchestra to publish news and general information about the orchestra etc.

The site's fairly simple and, like many other quick'n'dirty Joomla sites out there, uses a Joomlashack template.  Though its been put together a little spottily (menu item assignments don't seem to be uniform through the site so some pages don't feature the full navigation etc...), this site really reminded me how pervasive Joomla is for people who want just a tad more than say, a Wordpress blog.

For the '08 Beijing Olympic Orchestra that 'tad more' simply translates to multiple blog views of different content.  In fact, they have even implemented a really simple gallery by just embedding images into content items and linking them together using a lightbox extension - which is quite clever when you don't have a gajillion images that need tags and complex photo information etc...

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! :)