After many months of hard work by a very dedicated group of volunteers, today we proudly announce that the new Joomla! Community Magazine has launched! You can get to the JCM by clicking on the new Magazine link in the horizontal navigation for the Joomla! community site, or by going directly to http://magazine.joomla.org. In each monthly JCM issue you will find stories that will educate, inform, challenge, and inspire you. Read more here

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 3 (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 2 release on May 31, it have been fixed approximately 102 issues in the tracker. Much of this progress is directly related to the stepped up efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable!

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

The Joomla Project is proud to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.6 beta 2 (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 1 we have fixed approximately 140 issues. Much of this progress is directly related to the stepped up efforts of the Joomla! Bug Squad. Thanks for all your hard work in bringing us one increment closer to stable!

Read more about Joomla 1.6 Beta 2 release here.

The Joomla Project, a free, award-winning PHP-based content management system that enables users to build websites and powerful online applications, has announced the beta release of Joomla 1.6

Key Features in Joomla 1.6:

New Access Control System - Allows site administrators control over who can view and manage content.
Unlimited Depth Organizational Model - Gives site administrators and content creators user-defined category levels that allow for the creation of a category tree with as many or as few levels for organizing articles and other content as needed.
One-Click Extension Updates - Allows users to keep sites secure and controlled by simplifying the process of updating extensions.
Semantic XHTML Layouts - Provides a better baseline for content presentation.

In addition, developers and implementers will enjoy the new ability Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be built with granular control and permissions. This will make it easier to create more advanced, enterprise-focused applications and extensions for Joomla. Furthermore, there are numerous improvements in areas like code reuse, and considerable success in ensuring the stability of application programming interfaces via unit testing. Read more information here.

The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.17 [Wojmamni ama woobusani]. This is a priority release to correct two issues in version 1.5.16. Although there are no security issues fixed in this release, we consider it a security release because a security-related bug has been fixed and because many sites may be upgraded directly from 1.5.15 to 1.5.17.

The Development Working Group’s goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.
Click here to read more information and download Joomla 1.5.17

This module can be used as a replacement for the Virtuemart featured products, top products, random products or recent products modules. It displays product images as a 3 Dimensional Flash slideshow.

Unlike many Flash galleries, the slideshow content is generated dynamically from the product database. As the administrator you simply configure the module through the module parameters.

There are many options available with this module:-

* choice of featured products, top products, random products or recent products
* selected thumbnail size
* selected categories
* selected duration of slides
* choice of horizontal and vertical layouts for the thumbnails
* choose whether to auto-start show
* choose the 3 dimensional rotation of the images for a variety of 3D effects.

Read more about this Joomla extension at official Joomla website.

We’ve made a small reasearch and find out that it is very hard to find free VirtueMart themes nowadays. Actually it’s quite weird because this is a free Joomla extension and we wonder why there are no free templates for VirtueMart. Anyway we’ve got something for you and we hope that you’ll be glad to see this. This is a free Virtuemart template for a Mobile shop produced by TemplateMonster.com. This design has great layout, stunning details and you can easily apply this theme to your Joomla powered webstore.

A great way to save bandwidth is to take advantage of Google’s AJAX Libraries API to serve your favorite open-source JavaScript libraries.

For a Joomla user, Joomla import mootools.js automatically. Mootools.js is more than 70KB, If we host the mootools.js in Google, then how much bandwidth it will save?

For example, it will replace
“/media/system/js/mootools.js”
with
“http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools/1.11/mootools-yui-compressed.js”

or
“http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/mootools/1.21/mootools-yui-compressed.js”

It depends the version you have set. The mootools version must host on Google’s Ajax libraries.

The Joomla Plugin Google Ajax Library will automatically replace your local ajax libraries with Google’s AJAX libraries.

Support Ajax libraries:

1. Mootools
2. Prototype
3. JQuery
4. YUI
5. SWFObject

Benefits of the using Joomla Plugin: GoogleAjaxLib

* Save bandwidth.
* Speed up your site’s response.
* Service more online users.

V1.1 Use system plugin to give a big short replace.
V1.2 AddSWFObject

You can download this Joomla extension simply following this link.

You mau have heard about Ecwid shopping cart extension for Joomla - you can find more information here.There are few advantages to Ecwid comparing to other similar products.It has AJAX supports drag-and-drop. Upgrades are seamless and it requires little to no technical support. Of course it totally free of charge. Ecwid works nice with a fresh Joomla installation. All you need to remember is to disable WYSIWYG/HTML editor before inserting the Ecwid code. This shopping cart has product catalog, Google Checkout, supports paypal and has many more graet features. Hope that you’ll find using this extension useful for you.

In light of Joom!Fish’s recent accomplishment of 1,000,000 downloads on JoomlaCode.org, it seems fitting to blog about it.

To date there are 5 projects that have this distinction. As of this writing, they are:

• Joomla! (14,964,084 downloads)
• JEvents (1,846,222 downloads)
• Joomla! Spanish (1,624,758 downloads)
• DOCman (1,576,471 downloads)
• Joom!Fish multilingual extension (1,010,428 downloads)

From the looks of it, JoomlaPack and Fireboard/Kunena Forum are not too far behind.