I'm probably stealing someones thunder here but I'd just like to announce that the Joomla! Extensions Directory, or JED, today has reached over 4000 Joomla! extensions. This is a testament not only to the developers of our community who continue to produce new extensions to help you customise your Joomla! site the way you want it but towards the great JED Editors team who work behind the scenes to maintain the system and keep it up and running for the community. So thanks to the JED team for all their hard work and thanks to the developers who help to make Joomla! the great system it is today!

According to Steve Krug (aka Don't Make Me Think), there are two type of site visitors. Those that come to your site and start browsing, and those that tend to look for a search as their first step.

Brian Teeman (new blog, check it out), notes that most sites, Joomla or otherwise have the search in the top right. A convention worth keeping to.

I have gone back and forth with what type of search to use. I used to use the Joomla search, then I switched to the Google search. Steve B [...]

Each year Packt Publishing opens the voting booths for users everywhere to cast votes for the best content management system. There are a number of very qualified contenders in each of the categories including CMS Made Simple, Plone, and Drupal. This year, Joomla took the runner-up prize in the categories of Best Overall Open Source CMS Award and the Best PHP Open Source CMS (tied with CMS Made Simple). This results in a total prize winnings of $3500 to the Joomla Project.

Even though Joomla has taken home several Packt Awards in the past, Joomla Core Team member Andrew Eddie asserted, "This has made me more determined to do better next year."

Also, Joomla developer Johan Janssens was awarded the Open Source MVP 2008 prize, a new category in this year's awards, for his outstanding contributions to Joomla.

We at the Joomla Project would like to thank all of our wonderful users to voting for us and a big congratulations goes to Drupal for taking first place in the Best Overall Open Source CMS Award category. We also want to congratulate all the other winners.

Joomla Core Team member Brad Baker summed it up, "The future is bright for open source content management systems like Drupal and Joomla, whichever you use."

Perhaps it's the famous British reserve or just sheer laziness, but it has long surprised me that despite having one of the highest densities of Joomla users of any country in the world, there are remarkably few Joomla User Groups in the UK (just two*) and there has been only a single JoomlaDay (and that way back in 2006).  So it was a particular pleasure to be given the opportunity to play a part in kickstarting at least one new JUG in the UK and to help promote the upcoming JoomlaDay UK 2009.

The venue was the LinuxExpo Live event in London and it took place at the tail end of last week, 23rd to 25th October.  By the time we heard about the event I only had a couple of weeks to make all the preparations, so my apologies for the out-of-date flyers and the hastily thrown together CD's!  In the end it all went remarkably smoothly and it was a great pleasure to be able to meet and talk to so many people who use Joomla on a regular basis as well as the many people who came by having heard of Joomla but not knowing much about it.

Ryan Ozimek and I were on hand for the full three days and we were kept busy by a constant flow of people asking questions or just dropping in to say hello.  Well over 200 people visited the stand during the event.

Andy Wallace joined us and gave the upcoming JoomlaDay UK 2009 its first public outing.  Almost everyone I spoke to was interested in the event so I would recommend registering early to avoid disappointment.

James Kennard, author of "Mastering Joomla! 1.5 Extension and Framework Development" (available from the Joomla shop), also joined the stand and was kept busy answering questions.  As was Mike Lloyd, who as a Londoner was persuaded to take the plunge and finally get a London Joomla Users Group started.  Although London is a good four hours travelling time from where I live, I look forward to making it to at least one of the London JUG meetings in the near future.

Special thanks to our friends from Packt Publishing who arrived bearing a gift of books.  I put together a quick questionnaire with the books as prizes and this proved very useful in learning more about the people who were visiting our stand.  A huge thank you to Packt for supporting the Joomla project and open source in general.

Our gratitude is also extended to:

• uklinux.net and Linux User and Developer magazine for the stand space in the .org village and for promoting Joomla in the magazine.
• Rob Clayburn (pollen8) for being a great friend and fellow exhibitor.  Best of luck with Fabrik.
• Pete Coutts for his assistance in preparations for the event.
• The London Linux User Group for inviting us to join their special event meeting.  Good, honest pub food and interesting company.

Finally, a huge thank you to Ryan Ozimek, Andy Wallace, James Kennard and Mike Lloyd for their valuable time and support for the event.  We certainly raised the profile of Joomla in the United Kingdom!

* In case you are wondering about the two UK Joomla User Groups they are:

• Joomla User Group Norwich
• Aberdeen Joomla User Group

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In June we launched a revolutionary new service that provides fully managed Joomla websites and world class education and support. We call it Simplweb.

We are excited to announce the launch of a new program, the Simplweb Professional Partner Program. If you need help, or don't have the ti [...]

This is the week for the PackT 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. The week began with a new award that recognizes community. Two dozen open source projects and contributors were recognized by PackT, including Johan Janssens for his work with the Joomla! project.

Without Johan's contribution much of the Joomla! Framework we know today wouldn't exist, its good to see him honored with this award

We thank Johan for his contributions to the project. He was one of the original Joomla! Core Team members who took a huge leap of faith, not knowing how much work lay ahead, to initiate the Joomla! project. In the two years Johan was active, he wore a number of hats, having served as a developer, a lead developer, a project manager, and a member of the Open Source Matters Board of Directors. Although his direct involvement with the Joomla! project has come to a close, he continues as a third party developer of Joomla! solutions.

Joomla! has been blessed with phenomenal growth. Recently, the seven millionth copy of Joomla! was downloaded (and that only includes copies downloaded from JoomlaCode since March 2007.) Nearly a quarter of a million people have registered in the Joomla! Forums and their questions are answered by a large, active, helpful body of volunteers. Others have generously contributed documentation, translations, money, patches, legal advice, Web hosting and system administration, articles, and time.

If you have visited the Joomla! Extensions Directory recently, then you, too, must be impressed by the body of work produced by Joomla!'s army of third party developers. As a result of the contributions of thousands of developers, we can tweet and ping and Flickr and comment and translate and backup and restore and microblog and quote and authenticate and RSS and more. Thanks to our hard working Extension Editors and to each user who provides feedback and ratings to help inform others.

We recognize those who contribute locally. Thank you to each one of you who have started or helped with Joomla! Users Groups and Joomla! Day events. Thanks to those of you who have helped out with Expos and other events, or have simply demonstrated what Joomla! can do at your place of work or worship or neighborhood association. 

Our community powers Joomla! innovations and deployments. This spotlight on Johan is symbolic of the importance of every improvement each contributor brings, because in sum, that is what makes Joomla!. Again, many thanks, Johan, for your work, and many thanks to each of you who also help make Joomla! better -- in doing so, you are each Joomla!'s Most Valuable Players.

Some days we look at the web and see new and interesting things. Some days you just see stuff that breaks things. Today, Flash 10 is one of those. If you haven't heard the news, Flash 10 breaks a lot of web uploaders - ours included. Of course we're not the only one who has been impacted by this issue and it has been an issue during the beta. Solutions are coming out to resolve the issue and to Adobe's credit it has been documented. The issue in the short term is that Joomla!'s upload functionality isn't working if you're using Flash 10, so if this is functionality that you're really tied to try to avoid upgrading to Flash 10. Alternatively you can just disable the Flash uploader completely in Site > Global Configuration > System > Enable Flash Uploader and setting this to 'No'. At least for the current version of Joomla! (1.5.7) and for the next version that we're working on (1.5.8) we're not going to be in a position to update the library to fix the problem for Flash 10. Once fixes have been made available and tested we'll shift it into the next version of Joomla!.

Some Joomla developers were chatting about the possibility of running Joomla on server clouds and someone posted a link to a fascinating post on Richard Stallman on the topic. I read his comments, then re-read them... and then my mind boggled a bit more, and I had to re-read a third time.

Did he just say Gmail is stupidity worse than stupidity?

At this point, I couldn't run my business without Gmail. Its increased my productivity tremendously....

Stallman was quoted [...]