Got an email this morning announcing the new Digital Image Editor that runs inside of Joomla.   Very cool!!!  I have only tried the demo on the site, but it looks great.

It's a very basic editor that does simple things like crop, rotate, resize, flip, and apply a few filters. There's a history option so a client can go backwards if they make a mistake. That's really all a client needs to get images on their site. It's definitely not Photoshop -- but it doesn't NEED to be. This is intended for people who want to post a photo directly from the digital camera, then edit the image within Joomla, making Joomla one-stop shopping for posting content and images.

Drawback: it does save the original image and you save the edited version as another file. Downside to this is that your disk space could fill up very quickly with original pictures, particularly if they're straight off a many megapixel digital camera.

I'm tickled to announce that my new videos, "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" was released at Lynda.com today. Check them out!  Starting tomorrow, there will be a live action shot of me doing the introduction. There are a few free videos, so please go click all over them and check them out. Better yet, subscribe! Lynda.com is a great resource for learning all kinds of great skills.

My second set of videos, "Joomla! Advanced CSS" will be out later, maybe in a month or two.

I really love Joomla! User Group New England. We meet the 3rd Wednesday of each month. And it's amazing what happens when you put so many intelligent people in one room -- the problems we solve!

Earlier that day, I was working on a site that had just been upgraded to Joomla 1.5.8. I noticed that a script tag I had included in a piece of content was getting stripped out when I saved the article.

Step 1: examine the wysiwyg pro settings. Wysiwyg Pro is our prefered editor for Joomla, as its usability is awesome for our clients. Of course, it hadn't been stripping out the script tag before, so why was it going now?

In conjunction with Church & Main, we've launched the new Concord Group Insurance site.

CGI is a longtime client of Church & Main.  Their previous site was static HTML. While it looked great, it wasn't possible for CGI to make their own edits.

Church & Main provided us with all graphic design direction as well as strategy for the site. We built the site based on their requirements.

Finally, after months of work, we are thrilled to announce we've launched Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine.

This is a companion site to WineMaker Magazine, which was released earlier, in September.

BYO has been around for years, and puts out all kinds of interesting articles and resources for home beer brewers. We used a ton of extensions to make this site go, including JoomSuite Content, RS Gallery 2, MyBlog, VirtueMart, the Joomla poll and the Joomla banner module.

Got an email from Azrul today stating that they're going to stop developing for Joomla 1.0, now that Joomla 1.0's support end date is announced.  They will support products for Joomla 1.0 already out there and anyone under a support contract until the contract runs out.

Azrul writes great extensions like MyBlog, JomComment, and others. I'd recommend using his blogging software for any Joomla site actually writing a blog... rather than using the blog functionality to post press releases or whatnot.

Just another reason to upgrade to Joomla 1.5!

Flash 10 was released with the new Adobe CS4. I'm sure it does wonderful things for Adobe... but it's breaking a lot of Flash-based image uploaders out there, including Joomla's in the Media Manager.

More information on the Joomla site.

Basically, the Joomla team says that they will not be fixing this problem in 1.5.7 or 1.5.8, but will address it after that.  

Support for Joomla 1.0 is slated to end on July 22, 2009, 18 months after the release of Joomla 1.5.

 This leads to many Frequently Asked Questions.

 1. Should I be building my new Joomla sites in Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5?

I just got back from a week in Ventura, CA, working for Lynda.com.  If you don't know them, they are one of the best training resources out there for most things related to web development.  Way back at Dreamweaver 3 and Photoshop 5.5, I learned these programs via Lynda.com Hands-On Training books.  They've since put a huge emphasis on their online training video library. The videos are fantastic and very helpful for explaining how to do just about anything in the Adobe or web world.

Back in June, Lynda.com made their first push into the Joomla world with Joe LeBlanc's Joomla 1.5 Essential Training. They've been hearing requests for template and CSS training ever since.  I contacted them about the time the Essentials video came out, and I've been working on developing two sets of movies for them.

The  first course recorded was "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates."  This just focuses on how to transform your static HTML page to a Joomla template and goes over some common errors and problems you might have installing your templates.

Recently, we've been dealing with some web hosting issues with our current company.  They've changed our tech support package on us, and they were bought out by another company -- all without one email communication to us. We found out after the fact.

The story has a happy ending, as we've found another great host, and we're in the process of moving our sites.

This isn't the first time in my web career that I've dealt with icky web hosts.  Some cardinal rules of finding the right web host: