Some days ago, I published my JoomlaBlogger Community here at the blog. I have waited a few days to announce it, though, to have a soft start.

Now, however, I welcome all of you to join me and other Joomla addicts in a friendly, giving community.

The community is based upon the Joomla extension JomSocial. I have managed to secure a special deal for my members. Read on for more.

Just wanted to post a quick note about two upcoming reviews here on the blog.

I just received two Joomla books published by Pack Publishing and I'm reading through them to prepare for the reviews.

Joomla 1.5.15 was released today, three months after the 1.5.14 release.

The update contains two security fixes and a lot of bug fixes. A lot of issues with TinyMCE has been addressed.

There has also been an addition to the TinyMCE editor, i.e. the option to create templates in TinyMCE editor.

An important addition to the system is the added option to disallow users to view extension XML files. This was proposed by Brian Teeman, I believe, and will increase the security of your installation.

Great news, everyone! The second alpha version of Joomla 1.6 has been released by the project team. And this time, the ACL is in place.

Read on for more about the new features and additions, and what's in store for the beta release.

First, I want to remind you that any alpha or beta release is only meant for evaluation and testing purposes. They should never be used on a live website.

From Joomla.org today:

Joomla! is a finalist in the "Hall of Fame" and "Best Open Source PHP CMS" Awards sponsored by Packt Publishing.

With the exciting news about the implementation of Access Control Lists (ACL) in Joomla 1.6 and the incredible growth of all parts of the Joomla Project, now is a time to celebrate the great successes of this community. Over 1000 sites in the Site Showcase, 3500 extensions in the JED, 150 Resources in the JRD and almost 13 million downloads, what a great set of accomplishments by everyone in the Joomla community.

Remember that you can also vote for best extension and best template and nominate someone who you think is a Joomla MVP. There are so many great contributors who could be nominated. Think of all those people who make the JED, JRD, Showcase, Forums, JoomlaCode and Joomla itself possible.

I encourage all Joomla! fans to vote for Joomla for both awards.

I picked up a small comment from Hannes Papenberg from the Joomla 1.6 development team some time ago. He was talking about the process of upgrading from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6.

Today, Joomla is upgraded by copying all the files for the upgrade into the web root of the site. This works fine, and there are also some upgrade scripts that makes this process even faster.

Upgrading to a completely new version of Joomla is another case. Joomla 1.6 will have a lot of new functions and changes. Not only the files will change but also the structure of the tables, and some files will be deleted. Those things don't happen in a regular upgrade. Thus, the upgrade process is not just about copying files. Normally, the process would be to delete all of the files for 1.5, and then migrate all data, image files and setup into Joomla 1.6 manually. This is not ideal. For this reason, Hannes from the development team has proposed that a migration script be made.

I'm happy and excited to announce my very first contest here at Joomlablogger.net. If you have a Joomla website you can take part in the contest.

Jump in and participate! It's easy to enter and the price is very useful for everyone who owns or runs a Joomla website.

The contest is now closed. Check out this post for more about the winner: Winner of 'Joomla Greatest Challenge Contest' Chosen

Only some ten days has passed since my last update on Joomla 1.6. Then, the latest news was that Joomla 1.6 beta 1 would be released around now.

Today, however - the Joomla Production Team released news that they would soon announce the release of Joomla 1.6 Alpha 2. Apparently, the ACL (Access Control List) functionality is what makes the project take more time than previously expected.

Anything Digital and Yannick Gaultier has decided to give their users a discount on sh404SEF. This is to mark the joint-venture between Anything Digital and Yannick to continue the development, support and documentation of the SEF component sh404SEF. The codes are valid until September 30th 2009.

You will find the promo codes in this post.

During the last couple of years, I've created a few Joomla websites with Virtuemart as the e-commerce component. Although I struggled a bit to start with, I think it works fine now. I still find the control panels quite cluttered and not exactly intuitive, though. It took a lot of time to get to know all the quirks and oddities (like links that lead to not-yet implemented features...!). After a while, however, I have come to like VirtueMart, and have managed to set up a few quite successful webshops using it.

One of the things I don't like so much is the lack of themes and templates made for Virtuemart. A few weeks ago I was made aware of Yagendoo, a company specializing in templates and extensions for Joomla.

After using ChronoComments for a few months, I discovered that the component actually inserted a lot of crappy code in my template. It also made my site fail HTML validation, which really s**ks.

Those things, combined with the fact that ChronoComments hasn't been updated for a year now, urged me to look for an alternative. I just regret not doing it before ;)

As you might have read, the Joomla SEF extension sh404SEF was almost discontinued some weeks ago. The reason for this was that the developer, Yannick Gaultier, told the community in a blog post he was not able to continue the development of sh404SEF in his spare time.

After a lot of feedback from the Joomla community, he later announced that he'd found a solution for the continuation of the project through a Joomla company.

Late last night, Yannick published a new post, sharing the latest news about the project - and this is good news for all involved!