Yesterday I was answering a user question on the joomla forums.

It doesn't matter what it was about but the upshot was that the problem was a known issue in the latest release and that a patch had been written and approved and was ready and waiting to be included in the next release.

But it was 24 hours and a lot of testing before I realised that it was a known issue.

It's not practical for regular users to search the bug tracker for "known issues" and fixes as the tracker is less than friendly.

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As the year ends rather than look backwards at what has happened in the past it's time to look forward to what will happen in the coming year.

I made such a hash of last years predictions that I hope this year I will do a lot better by stating the obvious instead of stating what I dreamed of whilst recovering from days of indulging myself on beer, food and cookies.

Here are my Top 10 Predictions for 2010 (in no particular order).

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It is easy to sit back, moan and bitch. It is not easy to stand up and speak up. But if you don't then you have no right to complain.

In my travels to several Joomla! days this year, on skype and on email, I have been approached by a significant number of people who are all committed to the success of our Joomla! project.

Each one of them has had some gripe. Whether it be about the direction or speed of development, the changed role of OpenSourceMatters, trademarks in domains and logos, donations, software libraries but the actual issue doesn't really matter.

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An essay on the roles and responsibilites of users and community members in an open source project.

This is the first of several longer blog posts that examine the culture and ethos of an Open Source project, it's development, management, community and future.

Participation in the development of an Open Source Project is in almost all cases voluntary and traditional management cannot apply. Open Source developers are not therefore typically driven by financial motivation. Instead, consciously or not, peer esteem and a desire to acquire new skills are the driving factor.

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I've blogged before about the the forgotten interface and joomla usability improvements and recommended two extensions to improve the joomla admin experience, CQI for the control panel and Advanced Administrator Menu to reorganise the menus.

Today I'd like to introduce two other "improvements" to the Joomla Administrator interface.

Together they will help you improve accessibility, usability, performance and generally make your life easier.

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One of the strengths of Joomla is it's template system but this is also one of it's weaknesess. More and more the tendency for designers is to showcase as many different cool things as possible that they can achieve in a Joomla template rather than concentrate on presenting the site owner's content.

Personally I always consider the SCOPE of the template before selecting it

1. Suitability
2. Creativity
3. Originality
4. Performance
5. Expandibility

Depending on your needs, requirements and skills the amount of weighting you apply to each of these criteria may vary considerably.

I apply a much higher value on a templates performance and expandability than I do to the creativity. Perhaps this is because when I am looking at templates for a prospective site I always find I am more attracted to those templates that are crisp and clean than those that are busy with a thousand modules on the front page.

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A new version of the Joomla 1.5 series was released today, which is possibly the last release before 1.6.

This release contains a huge number of fixes specificaly in the TinyMCE editor and various fixes to provide php 5.3 compatibility.

Of course I'm particularly pleased to see a new line in the htaccess.txt file as this addresses what I believe has long been a security issue in exposing extension version numbers, this will have to be applied manually. See my Joomla Hidden Secrets presentation to see why I belive that exposing version numbers is a bad idea. Note the fix provided in the new htaccess.txt is far more advanced, and better, than the one I inititaly proposed - but heh I'm not a programmer.

There are two security fixes in this release and users are strongly encouraged to upgrade immediately.

NOTE please check the FAQ of known issues with 1.5.15 before upgrading

Please do NOT rely on an automatic updater

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Every day we get closer and closer to the release of Joomla! 1.6, and with the release of Joomla! 1.6 Alpha 2 imminent,  I thought it would be a bit of fun to have a competition to correctly detect the date and time of the release of Joomla! 1.6.0 Stable.

To avoid any confusion the time will be defined as GMT.

There will be a very special prize for the winner.

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Wow has it really been four years since Peter Russell and I sat down and wrote the press release that announced the birth of Joomla!.

So much has changed since then and yet so much is still the same.

Happy Birthday and congratulations to everyone who was there on that day, September 1st 2005.

In 2006 Johan and myself celebrated the first bithday with a cake and a candle at the first Joomla!Day in the UK.

Will you be celebrating today or perhaps having a JUG (Joomla User Group) party?

(I really should consign that photo to the trash - it was certainly a bad hair day. )