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?

The phone rang at 8:45 PM. "Help!" the client said. "We just sent an email out to 18,000 people and the slideshow on the home page doesn't work. Please fix it ASAP! This is an emergency!"

This is a relatively new client, one with whom we just started working in the last 2 weeks, and they have an existing Joomla website. They asked us to add a few things here and there, but we had never touched the slideshow on the home page. We weren't even sure how it was put together -- we simply hadn't had the time to look.

Having poked around the back end of the site, as well as looking at HTML and the front-end layout, we realized the slideshow on the home page was built using Flash. The slideshow was a SWF file. It was nothing special -- just a fade-in, fade-out series of images that could be clicked to go to the relevant pages.

We've all heard about the music pirating going on around the web. Why pay 99 cents for a song when you can download it for free? All of those musicians are rich and famous anyway, so why would they care if I take a copy of their song?

Likewise, there's a bunch of ebooks out there. Those book authors must also be rich and famous. Why would they care if I get their book for free somewhere?

I take posts like these very personally. Why? Because you're stealing from me.

The Performance Grader at JoomlaPerformance.com is a great tool for measuring how fast your Joomla site loads. It also features suggestions you can implement for increasing speed, such as reducing the number of stylesheets, scripts, validation, etc.