It's Saturday night at J and Beyond 2013 (well, it's already Sunday), and I'm about to go to bed. Checking the #jab13 tweets, I find a tweet from Sander Potjer with an image from the Bug Squashing Session going on - and I head over there to see what's going on. The room is packed with coders and testers, and the hours fly by!

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 10:

• Thanks to all who gave back at the Joomla Pizza, Bugs and Fun
• Joomla Roadmap Meeting: Production Working Groups & Lightning Talks
• SoftPraise 2.5 update with new features and now mobile responsive
• Release candidates are ready !
• A sticky nav for your Joomla template
• Zen Grid Framework Responsive Menu options
• A more social bamboo plus 2 Dribbble invites
• Agora Pro for Joomla 2.5 now available for just 99 cents!
• Joomla in the plain numbers
• Introducing Elegance Mobile Joomla! template & your chance to win a Free License!
• No Upgrades? You'll Scare Your Users Away
• Why Your Clients Need a Mobile Joomla Site and How to Sell it To Them
• Meet Paul Orwig: An Interview with the New OSM President

The CMS called Joomla is a product in constant evolution. Yesterday, the Joomla Production Leadership Team released Joomla 1.7.1. And it's all based on volunteer efforts. When a new version like 1.7 is released, there is bound to be number of bugs or incompatibilities in it. The complexity of Joomla, all the extensions and templates available, as well as the human factor makes that an inevitable fact. And sometimes, one finds out that the solution that was chosen doesn't work as well as expected and needs to be adjusted.

To be able to find all bugs and incompatibilities, the PLT, needs feedback from the community.

The question is, how do you report a bug in a way that is useful?

The Joomla Bug Squad has been instrumental in getting to where we are today. These people have relentlessly hunted for and squashed bugs in the software.

Without them, no-one knows when we would have seen the current version.

Although there are still many bugs in the software, they will be squashed in the weeks and months ahead. Again, the Bug Squad will be an important part of this process.

And so will you and I - we all need to chip in and report bugs, test the software and make sure 1.6 evolves into something as stable as the Joomla 1.5 we already know.

Today, the Joomla project announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 RC1 (download).

According to the press release at joomla.org, the team hopes this will be the only release candidate before a stable version. That remains to be seen.

There remains a lot of work before Joomla 1.6 is stable enough for a production site. Read on for more.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is still an evaluation version and is not intended for running a production site.

Today, the Joomla Project announced the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 14 (download). IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a beta version and is not intended to run any type of production site. It is intended to be used for evaluation purposes only.

Since the Joomla 1.6 beta 13 release on November 1, the team has fixed approximately 69 issues in the tracker. They have closed an additional 45 tracker issues. At the present time, they have 5 issues that are blocking the release 1.6 Release Candidate 1.

This progress is directly related to the continued efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks to everyone involved for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to a stable release of Joomla 1.6!

See the CHANGELOG below for details of what has been changed in this release.

As you might know, Joomla 1.6 beta 10 was released on Tuesday. Some people wonder why it takes that many beta versions to finish Joomla 1.6.

There is a lot of activity in the project. Nonetheless, here has been some disagreements and people have left the Joomla 1.6 Bug Squad. Others have since joined, and I hope we will see more activity in the coming weeks and months towards a Release Candidate for Joomla 1.6.

In this post, I look at some of the factors involved in the bug fixing of Joomla 1.6.

There is a lot of talk about how you can contribute to the Joomla! CMS project. Joomla! is an Open Source Project, and it needs every one of us to grow and expand.

On this page, I have collected and will continue to add ways for you to contribute to the Joomla! project. If you have anything to share, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or comment below.

First, read my article on this subject: Joomla! user? Contribute to the project! I wrote the post in June 2009. Most of this still holds true, so start there.