I hope you have read the chat log from the "Ask the Joomla team" session (or my highlights post about the same).

If you did, you might have seen that Joomla 1.6 beta is close to being released.

According to Mark Dexter of the Joomla team, the announcement of a beta version of Joomla 1.6 is about a week or two away.

On April 14th, the Joomla team conducted a chat session on IRC. The purpose of the chat was to give users an opportunity to connect with the Joomla team directly. And to ask questions about, in particular, Joomla 1.6.

Some days ago the team published the chat log from the event at joomla.org. I thought I'd spare you going through the complete log. The chat was hosted by Mark Dexter and Robert Deutz. So read on to get the highlights from the "Ask the Joomla team" chat session. As I see it, at least ;)

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 15.

The Joomla.org team is working on the new community site. And the Joomla leadership teams are working hard to increase the transparency of the project.

There are also some interesting views on the improvements of joomla.org and some insights into the work of developers in the Joomla community.

Enjoy!

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 14.

Brian takes a new shot at the Joomla Supporters Club idea, Alledia has a piece on how to automatically add joomla links to keywords, RocketTheme branches out to other areas (WP) and more.

Enjoy!

Open Source Matters and the Community Leadership Team announced today that CloudAccess.net has been selected to manage the Joomla! Demo Site.

OSM were particularly impressed with Cloud Access’ embrace of the goal to “Provide users who are considering the Joomla!® content management system with a simple and reliable way to try out its major features.” The Cloud Access team has excellent knowledge of Joomla! and will ensure that new users have sites that are set up optimally in terms of file ownership and other issues.

Packt Publishing has recently published The Joomla! 1.5 Beginner's Guide. A new book that will teach you to get started with Joomla! and quickly go beyond the basics.

This Beginner's Guide is different from the rest of them. It challenges you to start using Joomla! at full pace and build a basic website within an hour. But you won't get stuck at a beginner's level: the books guides you in taking things further and enhance your site step by step, with user friendly navigation, different page layouts, new functionality and a customized look and feel.

The book is easy to read, easy to follow, helping you to solve real-life web building problems. You'll learn to build, expand and customize one example website throughout the book, but you can easily apply the instructions to the particular site you yourself have in mind.

Read on to learn how you can win a copy of the book!

Here are some interesting Joomla blog posts I found during week 13.

I found the post by Brian Teeman about templates for Joomla 1.6 particularly interesting. The sample templates for Joomla 1.5 are quite outdated, and they could be better laid out as to help new users of Joomla understand the CMS better.

Enjoy the read!

As a reader of JoomlaBlogger, you're now entitled to a 10% discount over at Joomla Bamboo.

Joomla Bamboo is a premium Joomla template developer. They specialize in minimalist templates with a really clean and nice designs.

I've used some of the templates and I love the way they are built. Some of the designs are done by the designer David Vuu, and are just beautiful to look at.

If you use Community Builder, you might want to take a look at the two new authentication plug-ins: The Community Builder Facebook and Twitter Connect plug-ins.

Community Building is all about membership and often a successful membership site is measured by its membership population. Sites that empower Facebook Connect or Twitter Sign-in technologies have been experiencing an increase in their membership attraction rate by as much as 40%! You can now put this technology to use on your Community Builder powered websites by downloading our latest Community Builder add-ons: the Community Builder Facebook Connect and Community Builder Twitter Connect plug-ins.

Community Builder 1.2.2 has just been released and is a recommended upgrade as it further strengthens security aspects of Community Builder.

This is done even though there are no known vulnerabilities in Community Builder 1.2 and Community Builder 1.2.1 releases.