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, 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

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.

Ok, guys we have some really great news for Android fans and Joomla too. From now on you can manage your Joomla powered website with the help of Android powered device. Joooid is an Android client for the Joomla CMS: it has been created to publish articles with images, galleries and a map indicating the GPS position where the article has been published from. The article manager allows you to browse, publish or trash articles. The developer is currently working on a solution to embed YouTube videos as well. We hope that this client will be very useful for you.

Actually these are not even news because Joomla 1.6 Alpha 2 was released in October, 2009 but we want to notice that Alpha 2 has some details that are really important for the developers and Joomla users. We all know that Joomla 1.6 will be faster than the previous version. This release has such improvements:

Ecommerce nowadays is getting more popular and Joomla as one of the best CMS can’t stay aside. We as real fans of Joomla 1.5 templates assume that installing Virtuemart to your Joomla powered website can really enliven your business and make your project more profitable.This nice tutorial will help you to set up products at your Virtuemart store. Using this great Ecommerce Joomla extension is a perfect for middle sized stores and we know that you’ll feel all advantages of this software. Take care and stay with Joomla!

As many of you know, version 1.5 was released in January of 2007, almost 2 years ago. That means that it will be over 2 years between versions 1.5 and 1.6. I think most of us would agree that this is too long between versions. But just saying that releases must be more often doesn’t address the underlying issues and challenges.

Fortunately, discussion of how Joomla team can get to a more dynamic release cycle while preserving the stability and reliability that users have come to expect. Anyway to cut a long story short Joomla team is waiting for our feedback in discussing this problem and we hope that all Joomla fans will take chance and help to make Joomla better.