Joomla 2.5 has been released. Congratulations to the entire Joomla community! This is a long-term release and Joomla 1.5 will reach its end of life in April 2012 (see the Joomla development cycle infographic). We are recommending all Joomla sites be upgraded before then. You can download it at Joomla.org.

We're behind the ball slightly on this one, but after congratulating the Drupal community, we also need to congratulate the Joomla community for the recent release of Joomla 1.6! Both projects had major releases with major improvements at the start of this year.

From their announcement, here are some of the updates in Joomla 1.6:

Looking at your stats can give you a pretty good idea of how your visitors are using your site and which content they are finding, but sometimes it would be helpful to know a little more information. Setting up a heat map can help you determine which parts of the page are most prominent and are  the best at attracting clicks.

The Drupal and Joomla projects are both open source collaborations which release periodic updates to the codebase. You should always keep the code updated to the latest stable version that has been released since they often include security updates in addition to new features or bug fixes. (Keep in mind that you should be tracking and updating both the core code as well as any contributed extensions/modules that you may be using.)

We received a call recently from a group who had a Joomla site that was hacked. It turns out that one of their staff members had an insecure password and the hackers obtained the password, giving them direct access to the administration pages. Another way that hackers will sometimes try to compromise your site is to try to directly access insecure code from components or modules that haven't been updated. I thought it might be useful to post a quick security tip for non-profits that are running Joomla!

Third post in an on-going series comparing the basics of Drupal and Joomla.

This is the second in our series comparing the basics of Drupal and Joomla. As mentioned, both Drupal and Joomla have active communities that support the projects and produce add-ons which integrate with them for added functionality. In Drupal, these are called "modules" and in Joomla they are called "extensions" (a term which encompasses three sub-types: components, modules and plugins).

As we usually tell our non-profit partners, both Drupal and Joomla have their pluses and minuses. We recommend each of them for particular types of websites and for particular functional and content-related requirements. That said, we thought it might be worthwhile to start a new series on our blog describing some of the parallels between them as well as highlighting in more depth some of the differences.

If you're considering a site revision or complete site redo, you may be interested in this recent report by Idealware, comparing four major CMS systems: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone. (We implement sites in Joomla and Drupal at present, depending on the functional requirements of the site at hand).