The Joomla! spirit continues to grow in Africa this year, as Joomla!Day Nigeria comes near. On December 12, 2009, the great people in the Nigerian Joomla! community will be celebrating their Joomla! pride with their third annual Joomla!Day Nigeria in Lagos. Registration is free, but limited to 100 people, so register today!
Recently, Open Source Matters received an unsolicited proposal for the management of http://demo.joomla.org. After consideration and consultation with the Community Oversight Committee, the OSM board the Community Oversight Committee determined that, in the interest of fairness, others should also be invited to submit proposals.
Open Source Matters is requesting proposals for the management of the Joomla! demo site (http://demo.joomla.org). The existing Joomla!® demo site has been highly successful, with an average of 25,000 registrations monthly. OSM reasonably expects the number of registrations to increase with more prominent displays of the links to the site on the joomla.org family of websites. The joomla.org sites now receive approximately 5 million visits per month.
This is an open and competitive process. Responses to this RFP (“proposals”) received after December 9, 2009 will not be considered.
The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.15 [Wojmamni ama mamni]. It has been three months since Joomla 1.5.14 was released on July 30, 2009.
The Development Working Group’s goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community. We hope that these will be great news for all Joomla community.
VirtueMart is a free eCommerce Joomla extension that is written in PHP language. We have mentioned earlier about some really original project that was aimed to implement Magento shopping cart with Joomla CMS. Well today we want to tell you about the other side of this problem or frankly speaking about simpler and more reliable solution.
This Joomla extension has great list of advantages and we think that all these factors will help you a lot in the process of choosing shopping cart for your Joomla – powered wbesite. Of course the best thing is that VirtueMart is totally free 
. Other good points are superb Product Catalogue – You can easily add, edit, delete items you wish to sell. Promotions and News Items – it allows to show all latest products and special offers in a great variety of ways. Superb online payment – ‘VirtueMart’ is capable of live credit card processing with safe SSL encryption (128-bit) and supports a large amount of Payment Providers including PayPal and Redunicre.
B2B and B2C in one eCommerce shop – If you want to do business with other resellers as well as end consumers, we’ll setup your online shop to do just that! You can even have individual access areas for different client groups. VirtueMart works as well for 10,000 products as it does for 10, without additional performance or service issues.
And this is just a top of the list – take care and stay with us)
Ok, here is a little disclaimer for your guys: this post will be full of different weird words and letters but don’t be afraid this is not a voodoo or something. It’s just a names of Joomla extensions and we must admit that it is very hard to determine really most popular extensions because as we all know Joomla is an open source software and any third party can create extension. This is a main reason of invasion (in a good way of this word) various useful Joomla extenstions on the market.
We offer out vision of popular and useful Joomla 1.5 extensions and hope this information will be useful for you.
1. Have you ever heard about JFusion? I think that many of you know such shopping platform as Magento. This extension allows you to integrate this great eCommerce platform in Joomla 1.5. JFusion is a free GPL plugin which provides universal user integration, by extending the Joomla 1.5 user authentication framework without any core hacks.
2. Xmap creates both HTML and XML sitemaps seamlessly. When creating a sitemap you have the possibility to exclude content items where desired. The XML sitemap is useful for submitting to Google Sitemaps and adding to your robots.txt file.
3. Joomla Pack is great extension that allows you to create complete back up for your website (both files and database) that can be simply restored to another Joomla capable server.
4. Google Adsence PLugin – it is very simple extension that will help you to implement Adsence into your content easily and without any problems.
5. Sh404sef is a free extension but requires legacy mode to be activated in order to be installed and function correctly. Anyway it is very useful extension that will help you to create search engine friendly URLs, meta tag management for each page (title, description, keywords, author, language), add h1 tags to contentheadings and componentheadings.
6. JCE 1.5 is a 
WYSIWYG editor that includes advanced Image/Media and File handling, plugin support, and an Administration interface for editor configuration.
7. RSGallery2 is the gallery solution for your images. This component brings you templates, image management, access control and it supports 35 languages.
That’s all for now and we hope that you’ll find our small list informative and we are waiting for your vision of most popular Joomla 1.5 extensions in comments.
Well it is not a secret that Joomla is very user-friendly and flexible software. It is hard to surprise you with the fact that Joomla can contain Flash elements. The point is that you can do that by yourself or just buy some of our awesome Joomla 1.5 templates. Of course if you think that you can handle this situation we have some advices for you.
Well there are two ways that might help you to implement Flash environment to your Joomla website. First create your Flash animations in Anim-FX, and make sure the *.swf and *.txt files are in the base html directory. Do not make the mistake of uploading them into the images or images/flash directory. Also the flash does not work if loaded into the template directory. Both files must be in the html directory where the index.php file is located.
Install Flash Modules available on the internet for Joomla users
There are 2 Joomla Flash Modules and they both seem to work fairly well but one seems to have some problems with the File Path Parameter.
This is also the one that runs a Java Script for the flash as an option which seems to eliminate some IE 7 anomalies when you click on the flash window. The Modules are then controlled through Joomlas Administrator window and can be assigned to different places in the website to appear and not appear as desired.The Modules can also be assigned to different locations on the page left, right, top, header, etc… More information you can find here…
Are you ready to enjoy original Joomla websites? I think you do and here is the next topic – food and beverage websites for your autumn inspiration or just for fun. We have gathered few nice websites powered by Joomla and hope that you’ll estimate our efforts. So let’s start!
Sweet Ihop’s website has very gentle and smooth background with attractive color scheme. I’m charmed with their logo – admit that this is very nice logo and of course their products are something really sweet.
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Pizza anyone? Marco’s Pizza Joomla website has quite original design with awesome header. I don’t know why they have put vineyards there but it is very creative solution. And I must say about their navigation – it is very obvious as for me.
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Metro’s Joomla is a real masterpiece with classical dark background, awesome images and of course superb colors. I must claim that I was pretty surprised because of layout – it has many original details.
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I like Sabor’s website because they have tried to create nice design with a speck of business style. I can tell you that they have reached a certain success in this. Original color solution is really worth to be seen.
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Ok, this is a Sobieski site and please note: by reading this you confirm that you are at least 18 years old and that you are aware of the drinking responsibility. As for the website I can tell you for sure that their products as so good as their design (it was not an advertisement). Background is very creative and everything is just great .
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Our last example is very sweet and it’s performed in a white clean style with sophisticated details. White background, nice images in the header and superb navigation – these are the main reason why we have placed WD chocolate in our showcase.
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So everybody love colleges and universities? Even if you haven’t any life experience with these educational organizations I’m sure that many do love to watch college comedies and laugh at those simple jokes and captions in the web. Anyway Joomla becomes integral part of many nice things and today we want to show you how Joomla conquered colleges .
Good old Oklahoma strikes us with very modern Joomla design. Our fathers – founders must be proud of OSU because they have showed their best trying to present their University online. I like that they have used dynamic gallery as a background and nice interactive elements.
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CEPSR Clean Room sounds like some secret military project in Area 51 but this is just Columbia University’s project. I’m sure that you’ve noticed that this Joomla has really strict design. But I think that this is a best decision for such kind website. Cute background and original header are worth to put this design in our collection.
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Oh yeah, those faces in the header are the best symbol of really cool college life. As for the Howard’s (reminds Harry Potter’s school) Joomla website I can claim that they have done a really nice job. Amazing background, original logo, superb navigation – these features impress me most of all.
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Green Joomla website of Mount Carmel College of Nursing makes me wonder do they have really nurses-designers? Because their design is really elegant and remarkable though that this college hasn’t any relation to web design. Dynamic gallery in the header is one of the best details in this Joomla website.
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Clean and strict Newbold’s Joomla design is performed in a original manner because as you can see they have used simple white background and classical header.
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That’s a real college community’s website! I remember when I was in college – we can only dream about such things but now everything is possible. It is interesting that these guys have decided to make such original header – I haven’t seen before anything similar.
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Our last exhibit is a pure and clean Joomla that has constraining and sophisticated style. Basically this website is not a masterpiece of web design but it has its own charisma and I think that sometimes this is very important especially when you want to present very serious organization like UNC.
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I think that it is the one of the most favourite topics to discuss – what CMS platform is the best? I’m sure that we all like to make controversial discussions and try to argue that your choice is the perfect. Endless polemics about advantages of Joomla and WordPress have one useful feature – all these posts and forum threads are very priceless for the rookies.
Ok, first thing that seems to be very obvious – WP is only for blogging and Joomla is more universal CMS platform. Many of WP users say that this software is very simple and even unskilled user can handle it and I agree with that because Joomla requires some special knowledge. WordPress was created as more functional alternative for Blogger and Joomla was aimed to beat Mambo – and this is a reason that makes their origin almost the same. It is kind even ironical to write about these opposition using WP .
I don’t like that WP hasn’t normal navigation bar in the header but this problem can be solved by choosing one of the WordPress templates that contain this bar. In general many users consider that you can’t build normal website with the help of WP because Joomla contains ready-made submit page and many other things that you can’t find in WP. But those developers that have worked a lot with WordPress know that you can use TODO mini forms in WP that can make your WP-powered website more functional. I have experience to work with such forms and will say that it is very comfortable and easier than Joomla.
As for Joomla we must admit that this software pretends to be almost perfect CMS platform because you can create any website powered by Joomla – from simple personal blog to webstore or portal. To cut a long story short – I believe that both platforms are great and what to use – it is your personal decision. And our business is to provide you with more professional Joomla 1.5 Templates and some useful information about Joomla.
The Joomla! User Group Toronto will be holding it’s next informal pub night on Wednesday September 23, 2009, at 7pm. We’ll be meeting at Hemingway’s in Yorkville.
The team that normally organizeds these events is suffering from the bane of all volunteer groups — real life. Everyone is just a little busier than usual, so we’re relying on the community to get the word out. Please tell your Joomla friends, get the word out in social media, and find other creative (but legal!) ways to attract some attention.