It seems like this past week all I've been doing is software updates. Yesterday Joomla 1.5.23 was released. It fixed about a dozen bugs, including one low-impact security hole. Speaking of security, Virtuemart released 1.1.8 which fixes a security issue as well. I've got the majority of those upgrades completed. I've also been updating Community Builder to the current 1.4 release. If your site uses sh404sef, I've been updating that as well.

Joomla 1.6 development continues apace. Joomla 1.6.1 has just been released. This release fixes over 200 known issues, including about a dozen moderate security issues. Have we released any produciton 1.6 sites yet? Not yet. The number of 1.6 compatible extensions is growing, and is almost 1,000 now, including some big ones like Community Builder. One of our favorite extensions is the Joomla Content Editor (JCE) that most of you use without even thinking of. Its excellent image handling and extensive text formatting capacities rival desktop word processing applications. Unfortunately, it's not yet ready for Joomla 1.6. We'll continue to keep...

What is affiliate marketing and is it right for you? In its basic form, internet affiliate marketing is one site advertising another site's goods or services for sale. When someone follows the link and buys the item, the selling site gives the refering site a comission. One of the most successful sites doing this is Amazon.com. Consider our friend Steve's page selling ipod speakers. About a quarter way down the page, you'll see a box that says 'purchase from Amazon'. You click the button and it takes you to Amazon and puts the ipod speaker in your shopping basket. If you complete the purchase, Amazon gives Steve part of the purchase price.

There are pros and cons of being an affiliate an offering your wares through affiliates...

Well, at long last. Joomla 1.6 is shipping. There's a lot to like in the new version: more flexible user groups, categories, better organization of the administrator side, etc. There's still a few minor bugs in this release, so probably 1.6.1 or 1.6.2 will be much more stable. It's now time for the third-party developers to step up to the plate and update their extensions for 1.6. Of the 6,600+ Joomla extensions, only about 100 currently advertise that they're 1.6 ready. The good news is that some of the major components, like Community Builder are ready. We'll keep you posted on...

We register all our domains at GoDaddy. Why? a couple of reasons. 1) they're about the lowest-priced major domain registrar 2) they have a complete set of online tools to manage the domain name, its DNS and redirections. That's probably good enough. So we're now a GoDaddy affiliate in order to offer lower-cost deals to our clients. See the link below: Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!