Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 50:
• Spreading the Joomla!Love a Little Wider
• Support for Joomla 1.5, 2.5 and the Future!
• An Early Christmas Present
• A bright Joomla template to end the year
• Introducing Platform - A responsive Joomla template
• Bamboo christmas coupon
• Virtuemart 2 released today
• Picking up free Joomla extensions for education websites within minutes
• Joomla book review: Joomla 1.7 Beginner's Guide
Spreading the Joomla!Love a Little Wider
Written by Brian Teeman
Dear Joomlashack Friends,
It gives us great pleasure to welcome Brian Teeman to The Shack. As many of you may already know, since co-founding Joomla! and Open Source Matters in 2005, Brian has committed his every waking minute to sharing his love for Joomla and teaching people how to use Joomla the world over. Just this year, he visited over 13 different countries where he taught how to use Joomla and participated as a key-note speaker at Joomla Day events.
Starting in January, Brian will take over the job of Director of the School of Joomla! at Joomlashack University from our good friend Forest Linden
Support for Joomla 1.5, 2.5 and the Future!
Written by Andy Miller
We have been receiving lots of emails, facebook comments, and questions on the forum related to our plans for Joomla 1.5, and the upcoming release of Joomla 2.5. I thought I would take this opportunity to reiterate the planned Joomla releases cycle and our stance on supporting them.
Joomla 1.5 is what the Joomla team refer to as an LTS or Long Term Support Release. It was released in January of 2008 and has seen only minor bug fixes and security releases in nearly 4 years. The current version is 1.5.25 and support for this LTS version is set to end in April 2012.
Written by Ray
It’s the season for giving, so Joomlatools is very happy to announce an early Christmas present for our club members – beta versions of FILEman and LOGman are now available for download and testing.
• FILEman is our lightweight, simple, speedy and vamped up version of the Joomla media manager featuring multiple and remote file uploads, automatic thumbnail generation and easy file linking.
• LOGman brings Facebook style user activity streams to Joomla. Easily keep track of what is happening on your site and what other people are doing. Record and view the activities of your web administrators, writers, editors & even yourself.
A bright Joomla template to end the year
Written by Anthony Olsen
To end the year off on a bright note the December Joomla template release is going to be a very colourful number. The Colour Shift theme - or Shift as a working title - has been on the drawing board since September 2010.
It's one of those designs that I have toyed with off on and on over the last 12 or so months - just waiting and hoping something might come of it. Thankfully though I managed to find some time recently to refine it and the screenshots below show the end result.
We are aiming to get this one out the door by December 31st so please keep an eye out during the end of year break (if you are taking one) for the release.
Introducing Platform - A responsive Joomla template
Written by Anthony Olsen
Well after a considerable delay, I'm very happy to announce the availability of the November template.
But it's December?
I described in the Bamboo state of the union post some of the reasons for the delay in the release of this theme and I hope to be able to elaborate some more next week once we clear the decks of some other outstanding things on the todo list.
Subscription expired in between now and November 1st?
If your subscription expired in between the 1st of November and the 22nd December then you are entitled to a copy of this template. Please make contact with us via the contact form and we will give you the files for this Joomla template.
Written by Anthony Olsen
It's that time of the year again where we get to say thanks to all of our members for their support throughout the year.
The coupon "christmas" will add a 25% discount off any new subscription. In addition to this current members can add another 20% off that reduced price when they use the member coupon "jbrenewal". If you are a lapsed member you can also use the coupon "jbrenewal2" and add 10% to the reduced price.
You can see a list of plans on offer on our subscription page.
Written by Thomas Kahl
Finally - and after more than two years of work and testing - Virtuemart 2.0 was released today. It seems that it has been a hard piece of work to completely refactor the most important ecommerce solution for Joomla!.
Imagine - when the development started, Joomla 1.5 was still up to date and the only goal was, to make Virtuemart MVC-compatible. In the meantime, Joomla 1.6 and 1.7 was released and 2.5 is coming in the next weeks. It wasn't easy to keep track with all the framework changes.
Picking up free Joomla extensions for education websites within minutes
Written by Huyen
The Joomla platform is a great choice for education websites since it is easy to use and highly extensible. Its extensions meet the requirements of this type of website - to present staff profiles, to display organization events and so on. However, choosing suitable free Joomla extensions from the many ones out there is not simple at all.
If you build a website for school, I have a secret for you - I have made a list of useful free Joomla extensions for you. I checked many websites, took a note of useful extension types and chose similar ones on Joomla! Extensions Directory (JED). I also tested them on my local host to make sure they run well.
Joomla book review: Joomla 1.7 Beginner's Guide
Written by Dao Ngoc Anh
Some day you may want to make a website yourself, and you want it to be powered by Joomla CMS. However, the problem here is that you are newbie; you really don't know anything and don't know where you should start. So I will bring you a little bit of a surprise, a review of "Joomla 1.7 Beginner's Guide". It's a good Joomla book for beginners.
Before I read this guideline, I also knew nothing about Joomla or how to use it to create a website. However, I spent my time to explore this guide and I feel that it's really useful. So, now I make a Joomla book review to share it with you based on my own perspective.
