I briefly wanted to mention that the stable release of Joomla! 1.5 has finally arrived! Needless to say, there are some very happy people in the open source community to see this version of the content management system go gold.

I haven't taken a serious look at Joomla! 1.5 since Beta 1 and Beta 2 were out the door. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to taking a look at the finished product over the course of the next few weeks. Until then, below is a brief glimpse from the announcement at Joomla.org of what you can expect from version 1.5.

I was really surprised not only find out that Joomla! 1.5 is going through a third release candidate, but will likely be followed with more release candidates.  In most projects, the release canddate is a nearly-done final product where the only thing left is to make sure all the i's are dotted and all the t's are crossed.  Not so with Joomla! 1.5.

Johan Janssens's writes in his post, Is Joomla! 1.5 RC3 really a release candidate?:

In the last two weeks after the release of RC3 I have seen this question popping up on forums and mailing lists. I have seen complaints about RC3 being more of a break in development then a real release candidate. Some people seem to feel that we are still adding features and making functionality changes.

In this post I will try to give, in all honesty and openness, a status update on development and provide an answer to this question.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on designing Joomla! templates. Written by Tessa Blakeley Silver, Joomla! Template Design is a complete guide for web designers to all aspects of designing unique website templates for the free Joomla! PHP Content Management System.  Please visit http://www.packtpub.com

The Joomla! template is a series of files within the Joomla! CMS that controls the presentation of content. A template is the basic foundation design for viewing a Joomla! website. To produce the effect of a "complete" website, the template works hand in hand with the content stored in the Joomla! databases.

The Joomla! development team recently announced that they are committing themselves to the GPL license and that all propriety extensions will need to comply to the same license. This has caused some confusion concerning the distribution of templates. This is because a template package is made up of different files; some that the GNU GPL applies to and others that it doesn’t. Joomla!’s official stance is that non-code elements of a template package are just data acted upon by the software and may be licensed in any way that the author deems fit. Therefore, the current uncertainty over third party development of templates will require more users to create their own quality, professional-level templates.

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.