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?

Looking for information about Joomla 1.7 ACL? How about Joomla 2.5 ACL? My new title, Joomla 1.7 Access Control Lists (ACL) In Depth, will likely work with Joomla 2.5 as well. Here are a few free videos to check out. You can subscribe to see the full title at lynda.com.

Just to let everyone know, my article What You Need to Know About Joomla 1.6. Part 1: Improvements for Site Builders, originally posted at community.joomla.org, is now available in Spanish, thanks to Joomla User Group Quito Ecuador!

Lo que usted necesita saber sobre Joomla 1.6

Thank you so much, Juan Calderón, for your translation!

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).

Congratulations to everyone in the Joomla community for the release of Joomla 1.6! So many people are interested in the new software, and they need to come up to speed on it quickly.

Need to learn Joomla 1.6 in a hurry? I'm here to teach it to you! Here's a list of places I'll be presenting, teaching, blogging, and making videos in the next few months.

Immediate and ongoing: I have been blogging quite a bit at Compass Designs, Barrie North's excellent resource for all things Joomla. Come see my latest posts, including a group of great resources for learning Joomla 1.6.

Well, maybe explained is a strong term. But I do the best I can.

For my talk at Joomla Day NYC, here are my slides (PDF).

The two exercises will be based on my articles at community.joomla.org:

• Setting access levels to control who can read which content
• Setting permissions to control who can create/edit/delete content

Samara Iodice, my producer at lynda.com, and I had just finished up recording the Joomla 1.6 Beta Preview videos, and we had a little extra time. What would we do with ourselves?

We grabbed Lucas Deming and his video camera, and we headed out around the lynda.com building to ask people the question: What is Joomla?

Read the whole blog post and be sure to watch the video!

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.