As I wrote a few days ago in my post about  recommended software for your small business, I use software from 37Signals. The guys behind 37Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansson, have written a book called Rework.

In the book they outline the strategies which have made them such a successful company. And these strategies do not involve growing like mad, getting as much outside money as possible, spending wildly or work a crazy number of hours each day.

Rework is about doing things differently. Cut the crap, really. Do you really need long meetings? Do you need to control what every employee does every single minute? Do you really need outside money? Do everything have to be perfect before you launch it? The list of topics go on and on.

Joomla 1.5 Development Cookbook is a recent book about Joomla extension development, published by Packt Publishing.

The book is written by James Kennard, an extensions developer with more than 6 years of experience with Joomla.

After years of waiting, the new, major version of Virtuemart was released today. This new iteration of Virtuemart is completely rewritten, and is compatible with both Joomla 1.5 and 1.7 (soon to be 2.5).

Built on the Joomla MVC framework, VM 2.0 takes a long step forward in improving the most popular and widespread ecommerce solution for Joomla.

If you produce content for a blog or other Joomla website, you might want to charge for some of or all of the content. This business model has been successful for many WordPress blogs out there. The blog owner gives away a lot of free content, and then produces premium content that you can pay to access. Now, this funcionality is available for Joomla websites as well.

By downloading the free MediaPass extension, Joomla users can enable a recurring subscription service, without adding code manually to their template or articles. Publishers can even add the MediaPass subscription box to articles of selected categories automatically. This eases the use of the extension significantly.

Yesterday, JCE 2.0 "Stable" for Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 1.6 was released. Ryan Demmer, the developer of JCE, extends a big thank you to everyone who helped bring JCE 2.0 to this milestone. 

Please note that "stable" does not necessarily mean bug free but rather refers to the end of the development process for this version. Ryan asks you to please continue to post bug reports and issues you find in the Forum.

Ryan will be updating installation and other documentation this week and will also be posting the first in a series of "Developer Walk through" videos soon.

Ryan Demmer, the developer of JCE (Joomla Content Editor), showed me some of the new features in the upcoming version of the Image Manager Extended plug-in.

Image Manager Extended is a plug-in for JCE which allows you to upload, resize, place and otherwise work with images in Joomla content.

There are some cool things coming in JCE, so take a look at the screencast in this post to learn more.

Emmanuel Danan of FlexiContent fame, has silently released a new version of the software to GoogleCode.

Version 1.5.5 includes a number of bug fixes, as well as some new features. Among the new features is the addition of a new FlexiContent Tag Cloud module.

The version also removes a potential security risk (deprecated method "setCacheThumbChmod()")

During the lightning talks at J and Beyond 2011, Henrik Hussfelt of Migur.com presented their latest project.

The company Migur is working on a Joomla newsletter component, and Henrik took the opportunity to tell the crowd about it.

Migur developed this newsletter component with simplicity in mind. There is no inline HTML editing, there is easy module integration with Joomla! core modules and a template engine which makes it very easy to build professional looking templates.

After a long period of silence, a new version of FLEXIcontent was released last week. Version 1.5.4 is said to be even more stable than previous versions, and includes a number of fixes, improving security, speed and adding new features.

As this release contains two security fixes, all users should upgrade immediately. All confirmed issues found in the tracker have been solved and some exciting new features that Emmanuel and his collegues developed for their clients have been included in this release.

Last week, the VirtueMart Developer Team has published VirtueMart 1.1.8 to fix a security issue.

All VirtueMart users are urged to upgrade to this new version as soon as possible.

And in case you missed it, there was a release of VirtueMart 2.0 beta2 as well back in February.