Use Dummy Plugins For Images And Text We have updated two free plugins for you. Dummy Image Plugin and Dummy Text Plugin for Joomla 2.5. Both of these plugins will allow you to create and build a website substantially faster; Dummy Image Plugin has a variety of options available to make an image bigger, smaller, whatever color you wish, and even with or without a border. See examples.   Dummy Text Plugin let a single line of code render a full "Lorum Ipsum" dummy text. You can also do ordered and unordered lists or just single words. See examples   Free Download Remember, these plugins are free, and a terrific addition to your toolbox.

The Joomla Project announced the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5.0. This is a security release including 26 new features, 4 security issues fixed and 356 tracker issues fixed. Along with new features such as advanced search and automatic notification of Joomla core and extension updates, the Joomla CMS for the first time includes multi-database support with the addition of Microsoft SQL Server. Joomla 2.5.0 is is the next update from version 1.7. Version 2.5 is a so-called long-term-support (LTS) release that will be supported for at least 18 months by the project. Joomla 2.5 adheres to Joomla’s newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous  Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Using the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.

We get a growing number of questions from clients about what Joomla version to use. This is not a simple question to answer, since the answer varies from site to site and can be different per client, even if they run identical versions. In some cases a simple update or patch will help adding the latest security improvements, in other cases migrating obsolete code to a newer version might be the correct answer. Sometimes a pragmatic answer like 'sit still don't spend any money and', might be best. It may become too costly to migrate a relatively small Joomla 1.0 site to the latest 1.7-version available, especially when it hardly gets any traffic. In the event this 1.0 site is on a server with business critical applications/sites however, we'd strongly suggest to either move the site to a different server or safeguard your investments by migrating this obsolete site to Joomla 1.7. We would say the same for an intranet based on Joomla 1.0, just to further safeguard your valuable company information. One of the aspects to bare in mind is the Total Cost of Ownership, which is based on: Software Acquisition Cost (zero or minimal when using Joomla for your web project) Development Cost Maintenance Cost (like patches, upgrades, migrations, solving compatatibly issues) Information about past, present and future Joomla versions and release dates are a bit scattered over the internet. In an effort to help you forecast your future maintenance cost for Joomla upgrades/migrations, we have created a…

Hagen Graf is a Joomla Expert from the beginning. As an IT Consultant and Training in the larger CMS world he wrote several books on Joomla, both 1.5 and 1.6. Hagen is now working on a new book: Joomla 1.7 - Beginners Guide. Hagen will take the same approach as with the Joomla 1.6 Beginner's Guide, a true success story that shows the need of free available books in PDF and HTML format. (The PDF was downloaded more than 35.000 times since March 1, 2011.) At the time Joomla 1.5 was released, I edited the Dutch translation of Hagen's Joomla 1.5 book, Essentie van Joomla 1.5. I am honored that he now invited us to sponsor his upcoming FREE Joomla 1.7 - Beginners Guide! Together with a large number of leading players in the Joomlasphere (like Joomlart, Joomlablogger, Joomfish, Joomlaworks, Nooku, redComponent, Sigsiu and Yireo, to name a few) we will sponsor a chapter of this free Joomla 1.7 Beginner Guide. Next to that, we will discuss options with both Hagen and other sponsors to add additional value to this free Joomla 1.7 book by adding coupons to each chapter. Keep an eye on this blog, we will let you know when and how to get this free book as soon as it has been released. Update The Joomla 1.7 - Beginner's Guide is NOW avaliable for FREE here: As a pdf: http://cocoate.com/j17/pdf In HTML: http://cocoate.com/j17 We are proud to be a sponsor of this free Beginner's Guide for Joomla…