Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 47:
• Joomla! is not one community
• Last Steps to Joomla 2.5!
• Mexico CIty Runs Joomla
• Adding Drag & Drop uploads to Joomla
• DOCman 1.5.12 & 1.6.2 released
• The Bamboo state of the union
• How to make your joomla content socially engaging and improve seo
• Joomla Solution To Push Any Form Data Into Salesforce CRM
• The web development tools to start working with Joomla templates
• K2 v2.5.3 (maintenance release) now available
Written by Brian Teeman
This year I have been fortunate to travel and speak about Joomla in 13 countries across almost all the continents on the planet. One thing I quickly learned is that despite increasing globalistaion and harmonisation we are all different. I've written before about the obvious differences of language but there's much more too it than that. Local culture and economics play an important part as well in defining and differentiating the Joomla communities around the world. In India I observed an overwhelming hunger for knowledge, especially coding, to enable people to support others with specific parts of their web site.
Written by Jean Marie Simonet
Version 11.3 of the Platform has just been merged into the CMS and we are down to the last few weeks before 2.5! We plan to release Version 2.5 beta on or before December 20th. To make this schedule, we have until December 12th to propose and test new features. 1. Please test the present state of the CMS with your favorite extensions and report any bug on the Tracker. TEST: The CMS can be downloaded from https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/zipball/master (Not for production sites!)
Written by Steve Burge
Mexico City is, by some counts, the second largest city in the world. Over 18 million people live in the Distrito Federal (Federal District) that forms the city. How has government of Mexico City decided to keep in touch with those millions of citizens? Joomla. http://www.df.gob.mx now runs on Joomla 1.7 (the name D.F. is short for Distrito Federal and is how Mexicans normally refer to the city). In addition to Mexico City, many other Mexican government websites run on Joomla including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Palacio Nacional.
Adding Drag & Drop uploads to Joomla
Written by Rob Porter
We just updated the Weever Apps admin extension tonight, with a major overhaul of what was I think our weakest part -- uploads and general design management. The solution was integrating a rather nifty ajax uploader into our extension called.. well.. "Ajax Uploader" that is available under GPLv2 by Andrew Valums -- http://valums.com/ajax-upload/. What I like about it the most is that it doesn't require flash at all. Its entirely javascript.. and doesn't depend on MooTools or jQuery either, but will play nicely with both.
DOCman 1.5.12 & 1.6.2 released
Written by Rey
We are pleased to announce the immediately availability of maintenance releases for DOCman in our Member Center:
* DOCman 1.5.12 for Joomla 1.5
* DOCman 1.6.1 for Joomla 1.7
At Joomlatools, we are fully committed to providing you a quality product that just works. We constantly strive to eliminate the bugs. The maintenance releases fixes one non-critical bug in 1.5.12 & two non-critical bugs in 1.6.1 – these bugs also affect all previous versions. More information about the new releases can be found in our changelog.
Written by Anthony Olsen
As some of you may have noticed it's now December and we are yet to release the November template. November has been a funny month for us with some staff changes, a design that didn't quite come into it's own until quite late in the piece as well as needing more time than anticipated to bring a new module to the table. All of this has lead to us being incredibly late with the next template ... but please don't despair there is some good news ahead.
How to make your joomla content socially engaging and improve seo
Written by Victor Drover
In our last post we described the growing importance of social SEO on search engine result rankings and the positive effects available by creating a social feedback loop for your content. To facilitate social SEO, you need to include sharing icons such as these to your web site:
In this post we will detail how to implement the full suite of social SEO tools in sh404SEF® for use with articles in Joomla 1.7 (Joomla 1.5 can be configured in an identical fashion).
Joomla Solution To Push Any Form Data Into Salesforce CRM
Firstly we will create our extra 'custom' fields in Salesforce.
1. Login to your Salesforce account
2. Go to 'Setup > Customize > Leads > Fields'
3. At the bottom (Lead Custom Fields & Relationships) click 'New' and create your new custom field. This is assuming you know Salesforce...
4. After creating your new custom Lead field, you should see the following:
The web development tools to start working with Joomla templates
Written by Nhung
Have you just landed a developer job and there are many strange, new things for you to learn about templates development? Because IT is such a large world with a huge amount of things for you to discover, that can makes you feel bewildered at the beginning. From their experiences in building Joomla templates, the JoomlaShine Team will introduce to you a collection of useful web development tools that help front-end developers create magnificent websites.
For each phase of templates development, there are 3 kinds of tools as bellow:
* Graphic software to edit, slice design file to the individual image layers
* Editor software for writing your template code from scratch and customize them
*Debug & Test tools to customize, debug and test the websites, and to validate against web standards
K2 v2.5.3 (maintenance release) now available
Written by Fotis Evangelou
We have just released v2.5.3 of K2, fixing primarily minor glitches in 2.5.1 and a small (but significant) JS error that appeared in the short-lived 2.5.2 release (which we issued past Friday). If you are using K2 v2.5.1 you can safely upgrade to v2.5.3 by installing the 2.5.3 zip file on top of 2.5.1. As always, it's good to grab a backup just in case (you can use the free Akeeba Backup for that).
What has changed in 2.5.3? Here's a list of the most important ones:
 now available
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