Joomla is one of the most popular and talked about content management systems in the world; the other one is Wordpress. Content management system is a software that allows the owner to make changes to the website content themselves without any knowledge of web designing. From students to big companies have used Joomla to help them develop powerful and easy to manage websites. It saved them not hours but days of development time because of its scalability and the supportive community.

Most business owners wants to be able to update their websites themselves without the need of a web designer. They understand the extra cost they pay upfront will save them money in the long run. What this means is that if you are a freelance web designer then you need to be prepared for this. As the web design industry grows, it will become more competitive, therefore people will expect more from you.
With the help of Joomla you can give them exactly that! You clients will feel like they got a good deal from you.

Open source software/scripts have made it easy even for people without much of technical knowledge when it comes to building a website. The Joomla CMS software is a good example. It’s is one of the most popular free CMS on the Internet to date. Whether you run a professional web design company or you are someone who just want to build your own website, you can benefit from this great free CMS software. Many professional web designers have built simple websites as well as complicated ones with Joomla.

Windows has introduced since Windows Vista a new Desktop addition - Windows Sidebar.

Windows Sidebar is a pane on the side of the Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 desktop where you can keep your sidebar gadgets organized and always available. Gadgets come in a great variety, from Weather packs to financial information. There are a huge number of free gadgets available for download in Microsoft Sidebar Galleries. Windows Sidebar makes great use of the space on widescreen monitors and also works smoothly on standard displays.

You can easily customize Windows Sidebar to suit your preferred location—always on top or resting below maximized windows. If you don't want to keep your gadgets docked on the Windows Sidebar, you can simply move them off, hide the sidebar, and place them anywhere on your desktop.

Joomla Version 1.5.15 is now a Release Candidate on joomlacode.org - what is new and what to expect from this version?

Here are the changes at this point in 1.5.15 :

* several regular expression fixes (eregi replaced with preg_match)

eregi is DEPRECATED as of php v 5.3.0 and will be removed in php 6.0. Using this function in php 5.3 and later will cause a E_DEPRECATED exception

* several replaces of ereg_replace with str_replace

eregi is DEPRECATED as of php v 5.3.0 and will be removed in php 6.0. Using this function in php 5.3 and later will cause a E_DEPRECATED exception

* memory leak in com_menu

small memory leak - object not unset

* some language strings added

minor language strings additions

* upgrade of Simplepie library

Simplepie RSS parsing library upgraded to newer version. If your website relies heavily on RSS feeds then this will be good news for you

* upgrade of TinyMCE library (2.4.1 --> 2.6)

WYSIWYG editor upgraded from version 3.2.4.1 to 3.2.6 (latest version is 3.2.7, but that is quite a nice upgrade)

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.12 [Wojmamni Ama Woi]. This release contains a number of bug fixes and three moderate-level security fixes. It has been less than a month since Joomla 1.5.11 was released on June 3, 2009.

This release marks an important milestone for the Joomla Project due to the upgrade of the PEAR library to the new BSD licensed version, which brings the codebase into full compliance with the GPL. In addition, this release contains an important upgrade to TinyMCE v 3.2.4.1.

The Production Working Group's goal is to continue to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla community.

Websites implementing Auction Systems are no longer singularities in our web space. In the modern world supply and demand meet much more easier thanks to the internet. Selling goods on the internet is no longer a novelty, and ventures like eBay or Amazon are living proof. For a niche shop having its own auction site is a huge sales improvement. Even if you are listing items on eBay or other large auction websites – there is nothing like having an owned site, where you can control most of the variables. Having an auction site is greatly improving the measurability of the incoming traffic and optimizing exposure of your products.

Looking into today’s hosting market we can clearly see that php is one of the most used servers side scripting engines. Its popularity derives from the fact that it's free software – licensed under GNU/GPL, but not only – also the huge scale that php programming has come to. Our statistics show that 18% of all the freelancing jobs posted on RentACoder in the last year were based on PHP or PHP related. This is an increase of 20% compared to 2006. The easy access to the hosting, software, affordable programmers created the premises for PHP to become the leading platform for auction based websites.

The new released Joomla 1.5.11 was released on 03 June 2009, and contains 26 fixes, most security related issues.

There are several important fixes, just to mention:

Joomla! is prone to multiple cross-site scripting and HTML-injection vulnerabilities because the application fails to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied input. These issues affect the 'com_user' component, the 'JA_Purity' template, and the administrative panel in the 'Site client' subproject of the application.

An attacker can exploit these issues to steal cookie-based authentication credentials and launch other attacks.

Versions prior to Joomla!1.5.11 are vulnerable.

There are other fixes regarding several RSS feeds related issues in 1.5.10 and prior.

Users are strongly encouraged to update their websites to the latest release following these instructions:

http://docs.joomla.org/Upgrading_1.5_from_an_existing_1.5x_version

Adding comments to your website’s content is now that easy: install the extension, and there you go. No more template alterations, no separate module or plugin installation. It’s all in one package now.
Joomla Comment by Compojoom delivers one of the most advanced commenting system for joomla, enabling your users and visitors to exchange useful comments and to improve your relevancy in the SEO world with User generated Content.

Since the days of Mambo - Joomlapolis Community Builder (in those times it was Mambojoe's community builder) - was the only way to enhance the scarce profile of  Mambo/Joomla. CB is now one of the most popular Joomla extension in Extensions Directory and an Editor Pick  (one of the few picks there are).
Althou there is nothing wrong with Joomlapolis Extension, with time appeared some interesting alternatives to it. There are several Free, some Commercial and some of them even Encrypted (Joobi). We analysed two free Extensions that look very promising (and are both now in Beta stage)

Joomla Core Constants explained

Did you notice the amount of spam comments on PLIGG based posts?

It's amazing, i have 100ths per day, and i kept deleting them. I thought - why not cutting deeper and removing their backlink feature. It's very easy. you just need to open in a notepad the following file from your template: comment_show.tpl

search for "{$comment_content}" and replace it with "{$comment_content|strip_tags}

(at least 2 occurences)

That's all folks

Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets. The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo.
The name Joomla officially ends with an exclamation mark, but this is commonly omitted.
It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database by default.

Joomla’s building bricks are: Template, Articles, Components, Modules and Plugins. There are thousands of free Templates available and hundreds Proffesional commercial ones.
The main functionality of joomla is Article publishing. You can write articles in you administrator content and publish them on the front page or other menu items.
The strength of joomla lies in its components / Extensions. These are building blocks that can by far exceed any simple article website. You can install eCommerce extensions, Property management extensions, Auction Extensions, and many more type of components.

Articles are basically ‘articles’ or ‘posts’ that you write, which make up the better part of your website. Because Joomla is organized like a magazine, newsletter, or blog, content items represent individual articles that can contain an “intro” to the content item but don’t necessarily have to. If you’re posting a blog article that’s longer than 300 or 500 words, intros are helpful. If you’re just writing up some content for your website, you can enter all your text in the “intro” area as below and you’ll be fine!