As you probably know, Joomla 1.5 has reached end-of-life. It's no longer supported, and you shouldn't use it. OK?

That said - there are situations where the use of Joomla 1.5 is inevitable. For instance, I regularly come across people who want me to help them port their site to the latest version of Joomla. Sometimes, the site can't be upgraded immediately. Perhaps there's a financial issue at hand. Other times, it can be that the site is so complex and full of outdated extensions and special solutions that it's not possible to migrate without building new components or find alternatives. This can take time, and while you find the solutions the site needs to stay secure. 

The recent upgrade of Joomla to version 2.5 has made me think about the extensions and template providers I use. Whenever I choose a new type of extension for my clients, I take a look at the company's trackrecord. I ask myself some questions to determine if this is a developer I would like to bet my client's money on.

How long have they been around? What does users write online about their products? What do my friends in the Joomla community think about the product? How do they respond to support requests? What is their release cycle? How quickly are they supporting new, major versions of Joomla?

JoomlaLMS is a learning management system designed as an eLearning component for Joomla! CMS. Pedagogical approach used in the process of the system development makes it easy to use and administer with no technical skills required. The LMS provides a wide range of eLearning functions along with user-friendly interface. Check out the JoomlaLMS website for get more information, take an online demo or download a free trial.

Scribe is an SEO service that analyzes your content and tells you how you can make it better for search engines and get ranked higher. The service has been available for Drupal and WordPress for a while. A message about Joomla! support has been seen on the Scribe SEO site for a couple of months or so.

Today, the free Scribe SEO extension for Joomla was released.

The extension has been developed by the guys over at JoomlaShack in coorporation with Scribe SEO.

Yesterday, I was surfing the Joomla Extensions Directory for new Joomla Extensions. I noticed that a lot of new extensions for sh404SEF had been added on September 19th.

The extensions are created by JoomAce LLC, the company behind AceSEF, another SEF component for Joomla.

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.

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!

I woke up this morning to a blog post from Yannick Gaultier, developer of the immensely popular Joomla SEF extension sh404SEF.

For reasons know only to himself, he can no longer spend time on developing and supporting sh404SEF. When I first heard it, my heart sunk a bit, but it turned out it might not be as bad as it looks.

There are thousands of Joomla templates and extensions available on the market.

In this post you'll find a large listing of Joomla template and extension providers, and directories of the same. You'll find both commercial and free templates and extensions.

I've been struggling with a certain Joomla extension lately. Normally, Joomla extensions are quite easy to troubleshoot, and the help provided by the developer is generally good. However, this time I'm talking about a commercial extension, and the support is virtually non-existent. So my question is this: What kind of support should we expect from a commercial provider of Joomla extensions and templates?