Amit from Joomlatools contacted me to introduce me to their new company as well as their new product, Nooku.  The introduction is somewhat ironic given the fact that Johan already contacted me last Spring.  I have also had a link to Joomlatools' blogs in my Blogroll for a number of months!

However, it sounds like they're doing exciting stuff over at Joomlatools that should make quite a bit of the Joomla! community happy.  Nooku looks like a great product and the extension/framework should help Joomla! 1.5 users create multi-lingual websites more easily. I wish the best for Joomlatools.

The following is a copy of the email Amit sent to CMS Report.

Hello,

We wanted to introduce ourselves to you & the Joomla community.  We are a new company called Joomlatools, focused on building applications for Joomla users that want professional, extendable open source extensions.  All of our extensions will be built from the ground up with lots of user feedback, tried and tested by real customers and professionally written by folks who helped create Joomla!

"I am totally digging ScribeFire. It’s a Firefox extension that lets me write blog posts without leaving the web page I’m on. It can post to any blog server that can speak XML-RPC."

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One of the neat things about managing a site like CMSReport.com is that discussion on a topic can happen when you least expected. This is exactly what happened in the comment section of a rather benign post regarding a Latin American University's use of the content management system, Joomla! I was thanked by Open Source Community's Amy Stephen, also a Joomla! user, for posting an excerpt from one of the Joomla! working group blogs. Instead of a "you're welcome" I decided to ask some questions that have been puzzling me about the Joomla! community for some time.

Instead of hiding that discussion, I've attached the comments so far in the conversation. I'd really like to continue the discussion further with other Joomla! users. I think this is a good discussion for anyone like me who is trying to get to know Joomla! and its community better. Before I continue, let me share with you two personal motives for why I want to strike a conversation about Joomla!

1. I'm considering using Joomla! for a project. While I've installed and played with Joomla! many times (mostly 1.0.x though recently 1.5), I've never actually used Joomla! for a live production site.
2. Converstations with Joomla! user now using Drupal. While attending a recent Drupal Meetup, I spent my time talking about Joomla! and SharePoint. There was a new Drupal user at the meeting who was frustrated with the short-comings of Joomla! and was beginning to migrate over to Drupal. However, he still spoke highly of Joomla! and its community. It was an interesting one-on-one converstation in that while he wanted to like Drupal, he didn't quite get Drupal. It struck me that while I have wanted to like Joomla!, I have never really understood Joomla!. I left that Drupal meetup wanting to know more about Joomla!

So there is there is my motive for wanting to have more discussion about Joomla! In a nutshell, I want to like Joomla!, I just don't quite get it. Let's continue the discussion we've already started and help more non-Joomla! users like me out.

"eZ Systems is aggressively expanding and enhancing its flagship product, eZ Publish, with a new extension, enhanced features and compatibility with PHP 5 - while maintaining a smooth upgrade path for existing eZ Publish sites.

...eZ Find, a new extension for eZ Publish 3.x and 4.x, enhances the search functionality on eZ Publish sites and includes features such as relevance ranking, native support for eZ Publish access rights, keyword highlighting and the ability to search sites containing millions of objects."

Complete Story

Technical IT publishing company Packt, has published Learning Joomla! Extension Development, a book that helps create Joomla! 1.5 extensions with PHP. Written by professional Joomla! Extension Developer Joseph L. LeBlanc, this book gives programmers their first step in customizing and extending the features of Joomla! through custom PHP development.  For more information, please visit www.PacktPub.com/Joomla-Extensions/book

While Joomla! is packed with features, its greatest quality is that it is extremely extensible, allowing any number of complex applications to be cleanly integrated. Shopping carts, forums, social networking profiles, job boards, and real estate listings are all examples of extensions developers have written for Joomla!. All of these can run off one Joomla! site, while only one database, template, and core need to be maintained. When you build an extension to Joomla!, it will inherit the look and feel of the overall site. Any type of program that can be coded in PHP is a potential component waiting to be written!

Walk through the development of complete Joomla! components and modules with this tutorial for PHP programmers. Written for Joomla! version 1.5 and tested against pre-final releases, this book will get programmers started with coding professional looking extensions as quickly as possible.

"One of the cool new features coming in Firefox 3 is support for a new animated image format. Browsers have supported animated GIFs for more than a decade, but the GIF image format has a number of limitations and is overdue for replacement. The PNG image format is now widely accepted as a superior replacement for static GIF images, but for animated GIFs there has not yet been a clear successor. The new Animated PNG format (APNG) is a simple extension to PNG, making it superior for animations too."

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This is a free GNU/GPL extension compatible with Joomla 1.0.x (and also Joomla 1.5, in legacy mode).  This module is also an Editor's Pick at the Joomla! Extensions Directory."

NeoJoomla is happy to announce the release of version 1.4 of recruitment component: NeoRecruit!

NeoRecruit 1.4 allows a clearer posting of your job offers. The new module NeoRecruit Categories (supplied with the component) will display the categories tree, from which you could access directly the offers of a specific category.