JomSocial, the social networking component for Joomla! CMS, today announced the availability of the latest release, JomSocial 1.8. This version features the highly-anticipated Events management and overall improved usability.

JomSocial 1.8 is codenamed "Wazi", which is Swahili for clear, openness and clarity. JomSocial 1.8 is also the first version of this extension to be released as GPL.

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 24.

This week, Brian Teeman is all about 2010 Football World Cup and he links it to Joomla in a fun way.

There's also a piece on Mootools 1.2, a J and Beyond retrospective by JoomlaWorks and a look at how to deploy large-scale websites with Joomla.

Enjoy!

As you can imagine, I get a lot of requests to review and highlight Joomla! related products on this blog. As much as I want to help people, I just can't find the time to do them all. With over 4000 extensions in the Joomla Extensions Directory and a gazillion templates around, it goes without saying that it's impossible to cover it all.

That's why I've developed the concept of Quick Looks. These are paid, one-page overviews of a Joomla! template or extension. The overview will feature a short introduction, some screenshots, top features of the product and the cold facts like price etc.

Quick Looks are not reviews - but give you an insight into the workings of the product nonetheless.

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 23.

Brian Teeman has an interesting piece on the J&Beyond conference and community involvement.

There is also an interview with the Joomlaworks guys as well as a case study showing a big site using Joomla. Enjoy!

As expected, the third beta version of Joomla 1.6 was released yesterday. It's been two weeks since the last release, and the development team has kept it's promise of delivering time-based beta releases of Joomla 1.6 every 14 days.

If you've been following the Joomla! project for a while, you know that the releases have been sporadic and non-predictable. Especially the releases for Joomla! 1.6 (alpha / beta) have been far apart. Until now, that is.

At J! and Beyond in Wiesbaden, Chris Davenport of the Joomla! Development team told the crowd that future Joomla! releases will be date-based. This means at first that new beta versions of Joomla! 1.6 will be released every 14 days. Beta 3 is scheduled for June 14th 2010. The result being that the version will be released with the bug fixes added up until that point. This will continue until we have a release candidate and then a stable version of Joomla! 1.6.

After the release of 1.6, the plan is a release of a new major version of Joomla! every 6 months. Which means a release of 1.7 six months after 1.6 is launched etc.

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 22.

A lot of people attended «J and Beyond» this week, so there wasn't that many new posts. I guess next week will see a lot of new stuff on the Joomla! blogs around.

Enjoy!

Another patch update for the Joomla core was released on Friday. This version includes a fix for security issue, as well as a roll-back of a feature introduced in Joomla 1.5.16.

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 21.

This week, there's a case study on a multinational company using Joomla for their corporate website, a couple of Joomla 1.6 related posts and the announcement of the nominees for the J!Oscars awards. Guess who's nominated in two categories ;)

Enjoy the read!

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 20.

This week, there is a warning about (not) installing Joomla 1.6 beta on your live site, a write-up on the Joomla! Student Outreach Program and a post on how you can join the Joomla 1.6 bug squad, to mention some.

Enjoy the read :)