I woke up this morning to a blog post from Yannick Gaultier, developer of the immensely popular Joomla SEF extension sh404SEF.

For reasons know only to himself, he can no longer spend time on developing and supporting sh404SEF. When I first heard it, my heart sunk a bit, but it turned out it might not be as bad as it looks.

In case you missed it: JoomlaPraise released their new AdminPraise Lite template last week. And it's all free, all GPL!

The Fastest Joomla! Admin Template ever

AdminPraise Lite is a super lightweight Joomla! administrator panel template. Intelligent shortcuts, logical placement, and customization combine to bring you a totally optimized Joomla! experience.

Some people doesn't even know that there are back-end templates for Joomla available out there. Actually, they are as easy to install as the front-end templates.

When browsing Amazon.com today, I noticed a new book coming in November, available right now for pre-order:

• Advanced Joomla! by Dan Rahmel.

Written by bestselling Beginning Joomla! author Dan Rahmel, Advanced Joomla! provides you with the technical know-how and bonanza of information that allows you to take your Joomla! sites to the next level.

About the Book 'Advanced Joomla!'

Advanced Joomla! allows you to study beginning and advanced Joomla! topics back-to-back without requiring any additional outside knowledge. Moreover, it offers you advanced techniques for customizing a Joomla! CMS, including creating templates, administration, and building extensions. Integrate advanced Web 2.0 features into you Joomla! site, including social networking, blogging, and Google and Yahoo web services. Construct advanced Joomla! templates that use multiple stylesheets; third-party frameworks including MooTools and Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library for interactive display; specialty definitions for mobile users; and more!

The 4th Annual Open Source CMS Awards sponsored by Packt Publishing is open for nominations Joomla is eligible for Best PHP Open Source CMS and you can also nominate project contributors such as Open Source MVPs. The nominations are open until September 11. Voting among the top five nominees will begin on September 18.

Joomla, along with Drupal, is already a nominee in the new Hall of Fame category. This category will have sub-category awards for Best Extensions and Themes. These will be nominated by the CMS's representatives. Watch the community blogs for more information.

Simple Shop Remix, a recently released template from JoomlaPraise, is the easiest shopping cart in Joomla! Simple Shop Remix combines the best features of Joomla! and the simple shopping cart Foxycart!

This is JoomlaPraise's answer to JoomlaBamboo's recent remix of their template, and a creative way to introduce collaboration between Joomla clubs, since Joomla is really about the community we all build.

The latest offering from RocketTheme is the template called Nexus. The template comes with an SEO Friendly code base and contains a lot of color styles and customization options.

The latest offering from RocketTheme is the template called Nexus. The template comes with an SEO Friendly code base and contains a lot of color styles and customization options.

Check out more about the Nexus template from RocketTheme here

Flux is the newest YOOtheme creation, released as their template for August 2009. Flux is based on the new Warp5 Joomla template framework and is designed with a chromish style. The style is nice if you have a gaming site or similar.

I read a few good articles this week. Here are some of them.

The latest info on the release of Joomla 1.6 beta 1 says it will be available in the beginning of August this year.

In the meantime, let's have a look at the current state of affairs.

I've written a guest post on CMS Wire which was published earlier today.

In the post, I present a Google Summer of Code project that I believe many Joomla users will find useful: Native Multi-Site support.