Every year Linux Journal magazine conducts its Readers' Choice Awards which is an open poll to "take the current pulse of the Linux Community".

Vote for the software you use every day in your work and play and deserve to be acknowledged with this prestigious honour.

The polls are open until February 14th and give joomla a Valentine's Day present.

Please respect the magazine and only vote once.

I'm sat on top of the world looking down on creation...

This week I am in Athens, Greece, with my portable joomla training suite, staying still in one place is just not my thing.

As well as visiting the historic sites of the Acropolis, where European culture began, I'm fortunate enough to be spending some time with some very talented joomla designers and developers.

During the week here in Greece we are going to be working on the finishing touches to some very exciting, at least to me, new extensions for joomla. Over the next few blog posts I hope to be able to give some in-sight and teasers for you to wet your appetite.

Creating rich content on any site is difficult, especially if you want to maintain a house style. A CSS style sheet is great for consistent fonts and text sizes but ensuring that images are a uniform size, resource links are in the same positions etc is a different matter.

Sites with multiple authors have even more difficulty maintaining a house style and for sites I am involved with I usually end up producing a printed "house style sheet" containing things such as:

• thumbnail images are 200px square
  
• main images are 600px wide
• resource links bottom right of content
• embed video with this code snippet
• add gallery with this code snippet
• etc...

Everyone has seen a web site with a beautiful design layout ruined by one author forgetting to re-size their images.

Or a site so inflexible in design and structure that every content category had the exact same layout irrelevant as to it's suitability.

And how many sticky notes have you seen with reminders of plugin code for galleries, videos etc.?

This new uber-extension replaces com_content with a powerful all-in-one rich content creator that lets the authors concentrate on content and leaves the joomla site to handle everything else automagicaly.

Throw in nested categories (no waiting for joomla 1.6), tags (no integration of another third party extension), comments (no waiting for joomla 1.6 or integration of another third party extension), embedded video and image galleries and a few more goodies and you have a whole new joomla.

On friday I blogged that the current state of the joomla svn was not in a testable state.

Well after a hiatus in activity there has been a renewed burst in activity over at joomlacode.org and I highly recommend that all developers for joomla check it out now and follow development.

There is a very helpful mailing list that you can subscribe to for instant notification of any "commits" to the joomla 1.6 development trunk but there is nothing better than doing a full checkout.

If you're not familiar with an SVN repository then you will need some software to help you, personaly I use TortoiseSVN and then do a checkout of:

http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk/

A quick scan of the recent commits show several things that third party developers should be aware of. I won't go into detail here as a personal check is the best thing to do but one thing to keep an eye out for is for files moving location as the framework becomes separated from the cms.

There are also three new public mailing ists that developers can contribute to.

1. Joomla General Development
2. Joomla CMS development
3. Joomla Framework development

With open SVN and public mailing lists there is no excuse for any developer not to become involved in the future of joomla.

I've got another new toy.

I was having a little trouble today to think of a blog post that would actually be interesting.

I was going to write about my experiences testing an SVN a copy of joomla I. 6 but the current state of the svn made that unproductive.

So instead I am just going to wattle for a little bit to showcase my new toy. It's a digital pen.

It writes on regular paper just like a normal pen but a little usb black box is Clipped to the top of my notepad.When I plug the black box into my PC everything I have just written in my very poor handwriting is automatically converted into normal text.

I can then edit the text, make any conversion corrections, and paste it into joon la.

So that is exactly what I have done with this biog post, except to showcase the quality Of the conversion I have not made any corrections at all.

Buy my hand hurts after all this old school wriling.

Switching back to keyboard mode I think you will see that the pen did a pretty good job at capturing my handwriting but it sure is quicker to type than it is for me to go back to pen and ink.

However the real benefit from this pen is that I can use it anywhere. It doesnt have to be plugged in to the computer except to transfer the data.

Unlike other similar products it does not require expensive pads or clipboards any paper will so it really is portable and very quick to use.

I can even use it to sketch out plans for a web site.

If after all this waffle you are remotely interested in getting your own digital pen it's called a Digiscribble Mobile Note Taker.