Good analytics are hard to come by and are time consuming to collect. Nevertheless, Ric Shreves of Water and Stone has complied a paper entitled Open Source CMS Market Share which analyses 19 of the most prominent Open Source Content Management Systems. In this paper, Shreves identifies three systems that, in his words, dominate the present market. These systems are Wordpress, our own Joomla! and Drupal.

The saga started a year ago, on some wet morning in New Zealand. Being a designer is one thing, getting the designs out there is another. The quest for Internet exposure began and bundling my works on a personal website seemed a good idea. But wait, let me introduce you to my world, where design and illustrations are more real than wet mornings, where raindrops inspire instead of irritate.

"Marieke exemplifies a true Joomla! contributor..."

"From her very first task in the Google Highly Open Participation program, it was obvious Marieke was special."

Given enough time, that "ahha" moment eventually comes. The penny drops. The jigsaw puzzle starts to take shape. I clearly remember when I "got" MVC (Model View Controller) theory and realised my folly at being staunchly opposed to it. The same can be said for documentation and, in particular, developer documentation. It's a daunting task to work out how to organise hundreds of pages of information just about how you write code to work in Joomla!.

Toni's newest selections of cool GPL'ed Joomla! 1.5 extensions for August

The design obviously needed to communicate to the parents. At the same time, I wanted to demonstrate that this is not the typical children’s choir; this is an urban, up-to-date group doing modern RnB, Hip hop and break dance. If a mother asks her son if he’s interested in joining, and he’s not convinced, she can go: "Look here, it actually looks like something you would like!" At least, that was the goal.

So you've read all about the Joomla! Days that have taken place around the world, and you'd like to see one in your local area. How can you make it possible? Here are some tips and ideas based on the recent Joomla! Day Vancouver that will help to you get your own Joomla! Day off the ground.

Ron Severdia was invited by Jack Hanson to discuss PlayShakespeare.com on Comcast's Newsmakers for CNN. In this interview, he discusses the purpose of this Joomla! 1.5 Web site, interest of site visitors, and the importance of site contributors. In this article, Ron shares how Joomla! helps empower this community to fulfill their outreach goals.

In October 2007 a core group of Joomla! users formed the Joomla! Users Group of Cambodia (JUGCAM) which is now recognized by Joomla! as a free and open focal point for all who wish to share and learn about Joomla! in Cambodia. JUGCAM plans to assist on Khmer localization of Joomla!, setting up Joomla! Days and promote web development as a viable path for Cambodians who wish to take up technology as a career.

What is really satisfying is getting sufficiently involved in a project to be able to have a direct influence on it, as I am with "Joomla!". It's great to be able to identify a minor irritation, to fix it, and to get it to a production release.

Typically, most open source projects are funded by their community members. The Joomla! project is no different. The average donation is $55 in the US and $25 worldwide. Recently, Joomla! Day Norway donated $2500 to the project. We appreciate the generosity of the Norwegian community and thank all who have contributed financially, whether small or large!

Wikimania is a conference held annually by the Wikimedia foundation and this year it was hosted by the marvelous bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt). Possibly one of the largest geek parties to be ever held in Egypt, the topics varied widely. I was introduced to many distinguished geeks and hackers from different walks of Open Source, OLPC, FSF, Wikimedia, OpenStreet Maps, Semantic Wikimedia, Wikitravel, and alot more.

Of all of the resources available to help a new user learn Joomla!, my favorite is the Joomla! Sample website. Why? Because it lets you see how a working site is built. With the sample website, you can see how the site is written in Joomla! and how it looks to the user. You can also make changes to the site and see what the changes do. In this article we will take a tour of the Joomla! sample website and see what it can teach us about Joomla!.

Learn how to protect your Joomla! Web site. Taking time to learn and implement good security measures is recommended for anyone who manages their own Web site. These approaches are effective and easy to implement.

Joomla! 1.5 provides a Legacy Mode to allow most developers a way to get up-and-running easily.

Joomla! 1.5's Search Components has some interesting new features plus a few things have moved around.

One of the things I love the best about the Joomla! Community is how people share tips, tricks and resources with each other. Hopefully with this article I will be sharing some new resources to add to your designer "toolbox", some that I have used for years and some recently shared with me by others.

Jens-Christian Skibakk made changes to the Installer in Joomla! 1.5.4 so that it is possible to create one package for both the Administrator and Site language files. You can learn how to do this for Core and Extension language files in this article.

This developer tutorial is about using Ajax and Mootools for a Form in a MVC component. The example used aims at dynamically loading a list of MySQL table fields when a table is selected from another list. It is considered to be moderate difficulty and it requires Joomla! 1.5.3 or later, Mootools 1.1, PHP5 (or PHP4 with the json library).

This month, there have been many improvements in the Joomla! 1.5 code base including bug fixes, minor security improvements and several great enhancements. We encourage you to upgrade to Joomla! 1.5.5, if you haven't already.

On August 1, 2008, the 3,500 extension was added to the Joomla! Extensions Directory.

JoomlaConnect™ brings together Joomla! news from around the world.

Vote for RDF syndication in Joomla! and show support and interest in Semantify-ing J! Good luck Danh and Aini!