Last week, I wrote about the new extension from Open Source Training: OSToolbar. This is new extension places video tutorials throughout your Joomla administrator area.

I talked to Steve Burge to hear a bit more about how and why they created the extension, and how it can help the different types of Joomla users.

Virtuemart has been the largest ecommerce solution for Joomla for a number of years. However, the component has started to show signs of age.

The way VirtueMart was built is quite different from how Joomla is put together, and a growing number of users are feeling frustrated about the system.

In this post I take a look at the current state of the VirtueMart project (as I see it), and the future ahead of us. Will VirtueMart keep up?

The most wanted feature of Joomla! 1.6 is probably the new permissions system, called Access Control List (ACL). With Joomla! 1.6 ACL, you are able to define who has permission to do what on the website, called actions, like the login, configure, access, create, delete, edit and edit state.

These permissions are given to a group of users. You can configure the group permissions on 4 levels: Global configuration, Components and, if applicable, for Categories and Items.

Joomla! ACL is a great tool to define your own groups and their permissions. Unfortunately you will probably not enjoy the new Joomla! permissions system immediately due the difficulty to understand how the system works. It can be quite abstract.

This is where the ACL Manager for Joomla! 1.6 comes in!

Front-end developer Marco Barbosa has just released his advanced Joomla admin template: Minima.

This is a template for the Joomla administrator that changes the way it's presented. It also adds quite a few nifty features to the interface.

Minima is built using advanced CSS and other modern techniques. For that reason, you should use Firefox, Chrome, Safari or another browser with the latest CSS support to get the full experience from the template.

You will also need Joomla 1.6, as the template will only work on that version of the Joomla framework.

In October 2009, I wrote a blog post about migrating a Joomla! 1.5 site to version 1.6. I gave it the ambitious title of Migration from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 will be easy. And it probably will. When the script is ready.

However, Joomla 1.6 was released this week without a migration script in place. When I started to look at the state of this script, it seemed everything stopped back in 2009. Apparently, there was little interest from developers to create this script.

After some digging, I contacted Matias Aguirre, the one who started the original discussion around a Joomla 1.6 migrator script. He responded immediately, and I got some more info on the script. Matias has been working on a script called jUpgrade. It's partially working, but he needs help finishing it.

In a few months, the next major version of Joomla will be ready for production sites.

The first release candidate for Joomla 1.6 is just around the corner, so a stable release shouldn’t be too far away.

What does it take to move your Joomla site to Joomla 1.6? Read on for some tips :)

A few weeks ago, I got a question from one of my readers regarding the ecommerce solution Ecwid and Joomla.

The reader wanted to know if this web shop solution was a good one to use with a Joomla site.

To be honest, I hadn't heard about Ecwid before, so I decided to take a look.

For years, people have been asking for real remote blogging support for Joomla.

Remote blogging, or remote publishing, is when you use a desktop software package (Windows Live Writer) or plug-in (like ScribeFire for Firefox) to create and edit your posts.

When you're done, you add the post to the Joomla web site directly, without even logging in to the Joomla administrator.

Building a strong brand has a lot to do with being unique. And it's about positioning your brand so the audience knows who you are and what you stand for.

There are many shoe manufacturers out there, but Nike stands out because they "just do it". Apple sets itself apart from other companies by being extremely innovative and actually creating new product segments (the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad - need I say more?). Apple used the slogan Think different for a number of years.

A Content Management System in itself is not anything unique. There are many CMS out there, and quite a few of them have a lot going for them. How do they set themselves apart from the crowd? What do their brands stand for? In this post, I take a look at how three other CMS present themselves and how Joomla compares.

For a number of Joomla sites I create, the editing requirements for the client are quite low. What I mean is - they don't need to edit much more than the content of the site. Entering new and editing existing articles.

Sometimes, the computer knowledge of the user is quite limited. In these cases, I want the editing to be as easy as possible as possible. That's why I use the front-end editing capabilities of core Joomla, K2 and FlexiContent. Depending on which system I'm using for that particular site.

Front-end editing has an obvious advantage: The user knows exactly where she is in the system. She clicks to a page, sees something to edit, logs in and clicks edit. When logged in, she might also need a menu showing a link to add a new article and other links only visible to editors.

So, I want the front-end to be as intuitive as possible.

The other day, I realized how few Joomla template designers actually do something fresh and innovative in this respect. I think there is an opportunity to differentiate by improving how the editing mode of the site is presented. This is something I believe can be improved quite easily if the template designer cares about it.