There's been much talk about the new Joomla 2.5 release, the coming end of life (EOL) of Joomla 1.5 in April, and whether one should upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5.

So, should you upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5?

Article translations available:

• German translation by Marco, 1Man.at.
• Russian translation by Serge Postrash, jexy.ru
• Brazilian Portuguese translation by Manoel Silva, iikozen.com.br
• Dutch translation by GeHa.net
• Spanish translation by Alex Lopez

People are asking questions about how the upgrades from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 are going for client sites. They're also debating whether to build sites in Joomla 1.5 or 1.6 as of this writing (February 2011).

Let's say you're working with Joomla 1.5. You have one template set for the home page, and you have another template set for the inside pages on the website. Alternatively, you have the home page configured with one set of modules, that are very different than the inside page configurations. (For example, say you have a big slideshow on the home page, but not on the inside pages.)

You add the standard Joomla search box module. You do a quick search.

Where do the search results load? In the home page template, with the home page modules, no matter what you do or how you try.

My presentation is posted as a PDF.

For my talk on Website Strategy and Planning, I have a bunch of sites for review.

Find a partner or two. Then choose one of the below sites:

Two people in two days have asked me the same question, so I thought I'd post my answer here.

Let's say you have a simple three-column design for your website. There's a left, middle, and right column.

However, you need variations depending on the modules assigned (or not) to the left and right columns. The middle column always displays the content for the page. This is where the component lives.

Recently, Adobe released Dreamweaver CS5. One of its major new features is the ability to integrate with the CMS of your choice. They seem to push Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress in particular, but in theory, it works with any CMS.

I have been very skeptical of this integration from the beginning, because Joomla manages its files very differently than Drupal or Wordpress.

We all know that God kills a kitten when you edit Joomla’s core code. (Right? Right???) You are supposed to make a template override if you need to change something, leaving the core intact, so that your updates won’t get overwritten when you upgrade the site to its next version.

Dear Joomla,

We’re all so proud of you and how far you’ve come these five years. Your 20 parents conceived of you because they wanted to have fun. Ever since, people have come to you looking for a good time, to make friends all over the world, to contribute to the greater good.

In dog years, or technology years, you’re actually 35. This is actually a better age to describe you. You’re old enough to have been around the block, and old enough to know better. But you’re still plenty young enough to have passion, vision, ambition, and live on the cutting edge. And, of course, you still know how to party.

Last night, the Joomla leadership announced that they were looking for request for comment on a social networking community to reside at Joomla.org.

We know it will either be called social.joomla.org or people.joomla.org. We know that it's been decided that JomSocial will run the community.

We are asked for input about whether this is something we'd use, what we want included, and how we think we'd use it.

I have been designing and developing websites for 10 years now, but my company, 4Web Inc., has only been around for 2 years. (Prior to that, I ran a freelance company, Focused Consulting LLC.)

Back in 4Web's infancy, my colleagues attended the very first CMS Expo in May 2008.  (I was at Adobe headquarters for an Adobe User Group Manager summit and could not attend.) Back then it was a Joomla conference mostly. The networking was great, though, and my colleagues got to meet a lot of people.

That lead to Bill, Sam, and I being asked to speak in December 2008, when the conference was held in Denver. That was my first Expo, and the networking was really wonderful. It was so great to meet fellow Joomla developers and those interested in Joomla. I had just released my first Lynda.com videos as well, which coincided with the conference, so it was a very exciting time.

I believe that Joomla is the best open source content management system out there today. It's powerful but adaptable. You don't need to know PHP to use it and accomplish amazing things with it. If you do know PHP, you can do just about anything with it. It's been downloaded over 15 million times.

But as Bill Tomczak says, there used to be two TV recording formats: Beta and VHS. Everyone knew Beta was "better". But VHS eventually won the day.

"Holy Wars" have always been with us in the tech world. Emacs vs. vi, Mac vs. Windows, WordPerfect vs. MS Word -- you name it, there's a battle. And you could argue that there's another big battle looming out there, a three-way battle: Wordpress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla.