HowToJoomla! Blog: Joomla!

It's Christmas Eve here in my little part of the world. I just put my 1-year-old (as of December 16th) daughter to bed, and I thought I would see what was going on at Joomla.org. To my surprise, a lot is happening. The core team decided that Christmas Eve (or Christmas morning, depending on where you are in the world) was a good time to release the latest stable release of Joomla!, version 1.0.12. Check it out. The timestamp on the release announcement is actually set to December 12, so it looks like they've been sitting on this one and saving it for Christmas. It reminds me of when I was a kid, and my parents would hide all of our Christmas presents in their closet so we couldn't open them until Christmas.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Time to open your present.

Correction: Fiji Web Design, the makers of the TagBot Plugin, released version 1.0.5 beta, which fixes the XHTML validation errors. Thanks to RR Aranda for pointing that out to me.

Click here to download version 1.05 with valid XHTML.

I was using TagBot until I tried to check HowToJoomla's validation at the W3 Markup Validation Service. TagBot was creating several validation errors, so I have turned it off until I can look at the code and modify to make it output valid XHTML Transitional markup.

If valid markup is important to you (and it should be), do not use TagBot unless you know how to modify the code.

Barrie North has just released a chapter excerpt from his upcoming book, "Joomla 1.5: A User's Guide", about creating a template in Joomla! 1.5. Barrie is a great writer and educator, and he's an expert on Joomla!. Along with his tutorial, he has also released a free template for Joomla! 1.5. What a deal!

Click here to get the tutorial and template.

Click here to visit Barrie's commercial template site, JoomlaShack.com.

Thanks Barrie!

I just got an e-mail about the new version of JomComment, and apparently the newest version (version 1.7) supports Trackbacks. Trackback allows other sites to notify your site that they have written an article based on your content. Trackback support is one of the main "blog" features missing from Joomla!, and JomComment has finally made it available!

I am running JomComment here, and I will be upgrading to the new version as soon as I get a chance. If you have JomComment, you should upgrade to the latest version. If not, I strongly recommend that you get this product. I have been very pleased with it here at HowToJoomla.

I have set up a traffic ranking comparison between Joomla!, Drupal, Wordpress, and Mambo over at Alexa.com. The results will be automatically updated daily, so you can see how Joomla! compares with other open source CMS's.

You can see the graph of the ranking comparison here.