Many Joomla user wonder about what is going to happen to Joomla in the future. Where are we headed, and how long do we have to wait for the features we long for?

In this post, I'll give you an overview of how Joomla is going to progress in the years to come.

The Joomla Project needs your help in testing our next release: Joomla 1.5.12 RC. This Joomla release has 22 bug fixes and two updates that are significant enough to justify community testing.

The release candidate includes an upgrade to TinyMCE and changes to the framework PHPMailer class.

The JCE Administration Component and Editor Plugin have been updated and to make the process of upgrading installing easier, a new installation package is available which installs both the Administration Component and Editor Plugin in one go!

It is also no longer necessary to remove the Editor or Administration Component, or use ftp to copy the new files over the old when upgrading, an upgrade can be done just by installing!

Finally, Joomla 1.6 Alpha is ready for download. As I have previously mentioned, this is NOT software to be used on a live site.

Please download and install this on a test site only, and play around with it. The developers need your feedback and bug reports.

JoomlaDay New England seems to have been a great success. The team behind the event had succeeded in getting a great team of speakers assembled.

Joomla 1.6 Alpha is now only hours away from being released to the Community, according to Brian Teeman.

It's very important to note that this is an Alpha release - and is far from ready to be installed on a live site.

The upcoming Version Control Backend system for Joomla is nearing completion, and now we're invited to test it out by the developer Victor Carbune.

Naveen Gavini over at joomla.org has written a blog post about the future multi-site functionality of Joomla.

The multi-site component project, which is a Summer of Code project, has progressed, and some changes have been made since the last update from the developer.

As all Joomla users know, this CMS is open source, which in our case means it's made by volunteers across the globe. These people have a burning interest in making Joomla the best CMS out there.

How about you? Are you ready to contribute? It might seem hard to contribute to an open source project, but there are many tasks available other than programming the core of the system. In this article, I suggest some ways you may contribute to the Joomla! CMS project.

This is kinda old news for many of you, but if you haven't already seen it, head on over to www.linux.com.

The recently relaunched site use Joomla - and it's a clean and nicely done site.

In response to overwhelming interest and requests from the Joomla community, the Joomla Project announced that the Joomla Resource Directory goes online today at resources.joomla.org.

If you're a Joomla user, there's no easier way to find developers, service providers, and other valuable resources. This is a huge, and long-awaited, step forward for the Joomla Community, as it provides a way even for smaller companies to show off their services without paying for them.