Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 25:
• It’s Time for Joomla To Become Professional
• The First JoomlaDay in China
• What's new in 2.5.5
• RocketTheme T-Shirts
• FILEman RC3 released
• Introducing Zentools v13
• Free ebook | Joomla 2.5 Made Easy - A pocket manual for Joomla newbies
Written by Steve Burge
I was nervous before posting this but want to thank everyone for the big response. I’ve heard from a lot of people today and the great thing is many of them agree … we need to raise our game. I’ve turned comments off now. Instead of commenting, go and do something positive. Help move us forward. It’s time for the Joomla community to professionalize. I mean that in two senses.
Written by Hagen Graf
Joomla in China has a long tradition. Derek Joe is the head of the Chinese Translation team since Mambo days and runs joomla.cn. The Chinese Joomla forum attracts 12,000 members. Most of them are spread all over the country. As you know, China is a quite big country and many Joomla users cannot afford to spend a few days for traveling to and attending a JoomlaDay. At this first event 110 delegates registered and 80+ attended.
The event was held in the German Centre. A kind of conference and office space where eBay has its offices too. There was one track and in total 5 presentations.
Written by Jean Marie Simonet
2.5.5, apart from solving quite a few bugs, is also adding some nice new features. Here are a few of them:
Add ability to copy a template
This new feature lets create an exact copy of an existing template with a new name. It includes all necessary files including lang strings. Template Manager => Templates tab, click on an existing template.
Click on an existing template name, enter a new name in the field, click Copy Template.
Written by Andy Miller
Way back in November we announced a competition on the RocketTheme forums that challenged our members to submit designs for a new RocketTheme t-shirt. We wanted it to be funky, fun and geeky that really symbolized the great community of RocketTheme users. The response was fantastic. We had many replies in our forum and also via email from people that were not even members yet! Picking out a favorite design proved very difficult and so, rather than picking just one, we picked several!
We have put together a SpreadShirt store that showcases 5 distinct designs from 3 designers. The winning designs are:
Written by Myra
The third release candidate of FILEman is now available! FILEman now works well with IE 8 and 9 and has new frontend styling. Visit the FILEman changelog for the details of the release. You can give FILEman RC3 a spin today in our Joomla 1.5 and 2.5 demo sites.
Releases are available for all Joomlatools members through our Member Center. Get one installer for both Joomla 1.5 and 2.5. Visit our product pages to learn more about our new extensions.
Written by Anthony Olsen
After a fair amount of wrangling (and delay) v1.3 of the Zentools module is now available. This is a major update and one that I almost considered releasing as version 2. It comes with some great new features including the ability to apply presets and defaults as well as a new pagination layout. Members can download Zentools from the Zentools download page.
While Zentools is mostly easy to configure, we have added preset and default options to make it even easier to get up and running. Now it's simply a matter of clicking a few buttons and you can replicate any of the default layouts we showcase on the Zentools demo site.
Free ebook | Joomla 2.5 Made Easy - A pocket manual for Joomla newbies
Written by Dao Mgoc Anh
Everybody can use Joomla to build their websites, even when they haven't used it before. Why I am so sure of that? Because I am going to introduce a nice Joomla ebook to you. It guides Joomla newbies how to build a Joomla 2.5 website from the scratch, easily and quickly. We wrote the ebook "Joomla 2.5 Made Easy" from a Joomla newbie point of view.
Therefore, it is simple, clear and easy to follow with step-by-step guidelines and detailed figures. No more worries about what Joomla is, what components are included in, and how to work with it effectively with this book. It has 6 main chapters, and is 89 pages long, as follows:
Get to know about Joomla CMS
Install Joomla 2.5 on local host
