Brian Teeman

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

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.

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. )

Many years ago, when I was young and innocent, I lived in a self-sufficient "closed" community but now that I am older, and more mature (?), it is more accurate to say that today I chose to "participate" or "belong" to several different communities.

In the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) the word "community" is used as a badge, often without any true understanding  of what the word really means.

Joomla, like many F/LOSS projects, claims to be a community project but have you thought what that really means?

I received the following email last week

"Should we stall new clients until 1.6 is released, or build their sites on 1.5 knowing there will be some future re-work to migrate them to 1.6?  Maybe we should build now on 1.5 and leave them on 1.5?"

As I was writing a reply I realised that it might be better to appear here on the blog for others to read (and perhaps even comment).

Well I've spent, together with the other judges, the last few weeks evaluating the entries for the "Joomla Developers Showdown".

(Apologies for the delay in releasing this information - other things just got in the way)

It's certainly been interesting and we're very impressed with the quality of entries

We will be running this showdown again later in the year and I've learnt a few things that will hopefuly make it bigger and better.

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

This is a security release and users are strongly encouraged to upgrade immediately.

NOTE please check the FAQ of known issues with 1.5.13 before upgrading

Please do NOT rely on an automatic updater

There are two new bugs in this release - fixes available here

Good bye joomla 1.0 you've been a good friend over the years but sadly now it's time to say farewell

After over 1 million downloads of the very final release of the Joomla 1.0 it has now reached it's end of life.

There will be no further updates or security releases fro this Tuesday but what does that mean for sites that are still running Joomla 1.0?

In reality I suspect very little.

I'm a firm believer in using the right tool for the job. If I have an egg to crack I know I will get better results with a fork or the edge of the bowl than I will with a hammer. Of course a hammer can crack an egg but it will be messy and leave you with more egg on the floor than in the bowl.

So why use joomla to build a shop?

When a new (security) release of joomla is released how do you do the update?

Do you actually look at the changes or do you blindly do an update either via ftp or using an automated "update extension"

Blindly updating your site is not good security!!!

What? Is Brian saying that we shouldn't keep our joomla sites up to date. Absolutely not.