We've just won an award in Joomla Design.  This award is for creating a niche social network design for a client who needed an exciting and pulling design for their new network.  It involved a fairly heavy amount of upfront research, 6 wireframe versions, and a number of amends before we settled on the design.  But it trumped everything else and it looks great.  Actually implementing it was down to our Joomla Developers and they worked in tandem with our designers to create something special.

Indeed, mosst people find it hard to even recognise it as a Joomla driven website. 

In our opinion there is only design for your website and that's the correct one.  Our designers look at your markeplace, your audience, what goals you have set for the site, where it sits in your marketing strategy and what limitations are in place in terms of brand.  From that we get a proper design brief put together and produce wireframes, after knocking heads together, then we'll go to a complete design visual.  

We're really proud of our Joomla Designers they've done a great job on a number of award winning designs. 

The very latest Joomla Community Magazine has been released for December, 2012.  And it's a cracker this month too!  The writers are really firing on all cylinders this month.

Highlights this month include the astonishing statistic that 23% of attendees to the Joomla World Conference were infact female.  A figure that is pretty healthy.  But can the Joomla Community do more to help women get into Joomla?  Find out in Diane Henning's article.  I noted that this article was the most read.   Maybe the 77% male Joomla Jockeys attending had something to do with that...

On a down side, we have a joomla developer reviewing and comparing extensions that display content in a module - including his own extension.  Not sure if we can trust this comparision chart entirely but it does give other developers a look at where they're lagging. Not sure what the Joomla Community makes of the comparison by one of the developers who's product is being compared however.

By far the most interesting article was by Sarah Watz, and it detailed the plan for a Joomla Certification Program. Currently the community is looking for people who can provide help in setting up this program in a variety of areas. We'll definitely be seeing how we can help, having provided Joomla training for councils and governments.

The First Joomla Choice Extensions were also listed in this issue. Ten Joomla extensions developed by a variety of Joomla Developers are there.

in a surprise but welcome move, Jomsocial have released version 2.8 beta 2 to the wider Joomla community and not just developers.  This means they may be inundated with support issues but it also means they'll know about them quicker. 

Any Joomla 1.5 references have been removed from the code, the template has had a complete revamp in readiness for Joomla 3.0, it's faster and leaner than previous version, and finally the translated versions will be easier managed.

All in all a surprising but welcome release of this Jomsocial beta and we think developers and the community will welcome it.

Kunena have released version 2..0.3 to the wider Joomla Community.  There's a real reason if you're developing a Joomla site to upgrade as this version includes a Security release and all previous versions are now not supported.  So fellow developers, take their advice and upgrade your version of kunena.

Included in this release is an incredible 75 fixes for known issues, which means that either they've got a very good bug tracking management program or that the previous version was hung together by chewing gum.  We prefer the former, as we know they're good at what they do.

The other news is that they're finally working on Kunena for Joomla Version 3 which is great news for all Joomla Developers out there.

Mosets Tree version 3.0 will be coming very soon.  Sorry we're little behind the curve on this one, but we hadn't heard anything from them in a long time.  Their new versin of the popular directory extension for Joomla includes some long time wanted functionality.

This includes, allowing top level category directories so you can have multiple directories with just one instance of Mosets Tree.

Captcha support is finally included and a proper filtering system will be included out of the box.  

We look forward to seeing it!

As a side note they are currently looking for beta testers, so head on over to the Mosets Tree Forum if you're interested.

Virtuemart have released a point upgrade to the popular free shopping cart extension for Joomla.

This upgrade fixes a number of issues in the previous version and also improves the speed of use with caching.

There are a total of TEN fixes in this point release.  The most important in our view is the need to fix the error where custom fields could prevent a product being added to cart, but that is now fixed.  Great news.

To get the full list of fixes and the one additional feature follow this link Virtuemart 2.0.14

An announcement has been made on the future roadmap for the old favourite shopping cart Zen Cart to take it to version 1.5 and then beyond.

Read the Zencart road map here