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.

Here are 10 articles I read today. Joomla related? Well, most of them ;)

One of the sites I've set up with Joomla is a site for a Norwegian fraternal organization. They have well over a hundred local branches and a similar number of local editors. I've started giving a handful of them access to the Joomla front-end editing system, but have realized that the work flow in Joomla is far from perfect as it is now.

For that reason, I was extremely happy to see that there's a work flow extension in the works - addressing exactly the needs I have with the site mentioned.

RocketTheme has spent two months developing their new Affinity template. And there are a few good reasons for it.

The new Affinity template features a new module reordering ability. The function lets you order blocks vertically and modules horizontally in those blocks. You can reorder modules vertically in a module position. The order of the modules and blocks is remembered by the browser by use of a cookie. This way, the user sees the site the same way every time they visit the page - if they use the same browser, that is.

Affinity is the July 2009 release from RocketTheme and features extensive third party support for powerful and popular community products, such as JomSocial, K2 and phpBB3.

RocketTheme has also integrated styled support for various RocketTheme Extensions such as RokTabs and RokAjaxSearch.

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.12 [Wojmamni Ama Woi]. This release contains a number of bug fixes and three moderate-level security fixes. It has been less than a month since Joomla 1.5.11 was released on June 3, 2008.

Sometimes there are such a lot of stuff going on that I just can't report on everything. But that doesn't stop me from sharing it with you anyway, right?

Here are 10 Joomla related and non-related (but good nonetheless) articles I read today.

K2 is a great new GPL extension from JoomlaWorks. It's used for managing content that packs a lot more punch than the traditional Joomla content component can offer.

It provides a flexible article format that allows you to add images, attachments, comments, and even custom fields to your content.

RocketTheme obviously likes the K2 product a lot, as they have decided to implement support for this extension in their own extensions.

The Joomla Project needs your help in testing our next release: Joomla 1.5.12 RC. This Joomla release has 22 bug fixes and two updates that are significant enough to justify community testing.

The release candidate includes an upgrade to TinyMCE and changes to the framework PHPMailer class.

The JCE Administration Component and Editor Plugin have been updated and to make the process of upgrading installing easier, a new installation package is available which installs both the Administration Component and Editor Plugin in one go!

It is also no longer necessary to remove the Editor or Administration Component, or use ftp to copy the new files over the old when upgrading, an upgrade can be done just by installing!

Finally, Joomla 1.6 Alpha is ready for download. As I have previously mentioned, this is NOT software to be used on a live site.

Please download and install this on a test site only, and play around with it. The developers need your feedback and bug reports.