No, this is not a mistake... in our ecumenical web design effort to be open and honest to all of the open source universe; we do sincerely promote this great CMS... but coud it really be better than Joomla!

According to the last few years of awards, Drupal has been on the top or near... in 2008 I know it took the award for best open source CMS from packt publishing.

Here is a complete listing over the past few years...

Joomla! took it the first year in 2006, but over the past 4 years... Drupal is on top...

Much of our discussion of late has been around the availability of something novel for Joomla! users, a content construction kit.  Well, Drupal has had this for years and it works really well.

Drupal CCK

So if you want an award winning CMS with a really great CCK, look no further than Drupal.  Unless of course, you get stuck with the tech and just want all the immediate flexibility of Joomla!

But who knows, maybe we will all be using wordpress before the day is done... they won last year!

One of the big draws for me to Joomla! initially was the community support.  I did not feel alone when I was jumping in.  Joomla! was actually introduced to me by a coworker before it forked from mambo.

Mambo has not had a news post on its site since 2008, well that is what you get for trying to jump ship on open source.

Drupal is a great open source CMS and it is so because of a community that supports it as well as the Joomla! community.  When I meet folks like Alex Fisher, I know that their expertise and decisions are not in vain... and the choice to go with Drupal makes a lot of sense.

If you want to jump into Drupal, there is a user group right around the corner, with experts like Alex waiting to help you take the next step.  For all of us trying to wrangle the octopus of web design, this is invaluable.  Sure you could read his blog , but here you get to ask him a question in person.

Michigan Drupal User Group

Or if you need to build out a Drupal website for your next project, you could hire him!

Commercial Progression Drupal Web Design

The Joomla Project announces the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.20 [senu takaa]. This is a security release that addresses issues with the Joomla 1.5.19 packages.  We recommend users upgrade immediately.

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

Download

Click here to download Joomla 1.5.20 (Full package) »

Click here to download Joomla 1.5.20 (Upgrade packages) »

Instructions

• New installation and technical requirements
• Upgrade from an existing Joomla 1.5 version
• Migration from Joomla! 1.0.x

Want to test drive Joomla? Try the online demo or the Joomla JumpBox. Documentation is available for beginners.

Please note that you should always backup your site before upgrading.

Recording of July7th, 2010 Meetup

With the allvideos plugin this seems to playback in QT, would rather have flash... but here is the file if you want to download it.

Ok, so it is a long time coming, but here is the first of hopefully many screen-capture sessions from our monthly meetings.  It is a bit long (90 minutes), but if you remember a section that was valuable, you should be able to jump around and find what you are looking for.  I experimented with putting my beautiful face in the corner complete with expressive hand gestures... it communicates so much more doesn't it?

Click Read More to View

Zoo 2.0 is out, and now there is a real contender for a usable content creation kit for Joomla! other than K2.  Not that K2 is not good or well accepted, its just missing some stuff... like all software.  So here is an alternative, Zoo.  Nested categories and the ability to place an article in more than one at a time is just the beginning.

The component is available for free, and you just by the add on app configurations for it.  Wait for Joomla! 1.6 or go with zoo, now you have another question to answer for that Joomla! project that needs a little something more than what 1.5 offers.

I will be digging into Zoo and intend to demo it at the June meetup.

Try it out, and let me know what you think!

• Yootheme website
• Zoo component
• A blog I found with some thoughts

In the most recent user group session we gave a crash course into K2.  We approached K2 by showing some of the current limitations within the traditional Joomla! content creation system and how K2 was designed to fill those needs.  Many of the things K2 seeks to address, content structure and ACL, will be addressed in future releases of Joomla!  It also puts together a nice package of tools that normally would have to be added on one at a time from multiple vendors.

• Better Categorizing options
• Extra fields
• Commenting
• Tagging
• User group creation
• Content templates

Its all pretty great stuff, and if you need it right now and you want to spend the time to figure out this brand new software that may be rendered obsolete as soon as Joomla! 1.6 arrives (which nobody knows when) then its a good option.  Other developers are already starting to notice K2 and create their plugins to work with it, much like the popular community builder extension of yesteryear and its commercial rival jomsocial.

Visit K2 on the Joomla! Works website

K2 in the extensions directory

I have yet to really jump into this CCK other than the initial download and reading up a little bit about the features.  But what I have seen so far looks to be very comprehensive.  This may be the most powerful CCK available for Joomla! ... if you can figure out how to make it go.

I intend to give this a shot and try to make a decent analysis for our next meeting.

• jSeblod Website 
• jSeblod in the Joomla! Extention Directory

Durring the last couple of user group meetings the very real question of...

"What does Joomla! 1.6 look like and when does it get released"

... has  been posed.  I have done a little bit of research on this and I have put together a couple of resources below for those folks interested in knowing about the forthcoming developments of Joomla! 1.6

 What will it look like?

There are a few major changes happening to Joomla!'s ACL (access control levels), that is how you control what people are allowed to do and see on the site.  This is a major change that a host of existing plugins and components are currently trying to deal with and I imagine a bunch of current components will become obsolete over night for new projects and many new horizons of development will be opened up.

Check out this video tour by Amy Stephen of the Joomla! Development Team.

When will it get released?

http://docs.joomla.org/Joomla!_1.6_Development_Status

The short and smarmy answer I have found on the forums is "when it is done!", here is a forum thread with some decent information.  I have not seen anything committing to a particular release schedule.  Hey, this is open source community development not corporate software, insert winking smiley here.

Here is the developers Google Group

So, if you really want to know, these are the places to look and ask questions.