We help numerous organizations implement e-mail marketing packages like MailChimp and Constant Contact. We even help some develop and maintain campaigns. E-mail marketing used to be a load and fire kind of activity, but things have changed over the years from a legal and technical standpoint. So how do you keep up?

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.

One of the things we try hard to do is not reinvent the wheel. That's why we use Joomla! instead of writing our own Content Management System, why we search hard for off-the-shelf components before we write our own. For our servers, we rent from a large, reputable company and use one of the three industry-standard control panels. This is to give our customers the best value for their money by not reinventing wheels and for security, in case we lose a team member as standard skills are much easier to replace. There's one exception to our 'never reinvent the wheel' rule...

Although many of you may have participated in a GoToMeeting, some have been missing out on this great "remote" conferencing tool. It's hard not to hear about it these days, as I understand they are now advertising on national TV. With gas at a premium and rising, here's to becoming an early adopter!

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...