In case you hadn't heard, Joomla 1.5.10 looks to be ready soon.

Keep an eye on the Joomla Forum Announcements board for details and upgrade instructions.

As a member of the editorial team at the Joomla Extension Directory, I see a lot of extensions in the course of a day. Many times these are helpful plugins or modules that make site maintenance a little easier or a little smarter. I love those gems.

But occassionally, an extension comes along that really looks promising and generates a lot of buzz in the Joomlasphere. The recently released social networking application JomSocial is one such extension that has taken the community by storm.

A few moments ago my YooTheme RSS feed refreshed and I was pleasantly surprised to find a new blog post describing some details about their forthcoming extension for which they have been running a clever, teaser-style guerilla-marketing campaign. ZOO, as it is named for the time being, is based on the same concept as the Content Creation Kit (CCK) for Drupal. As in Drupal, the purpose of ZOO is to give Joomla site admins the ability to create new types of content articles with specific features. For example, maybe you would like to add custom fields to a content article. ZOO will allow you to create many different types of content types with unique fields and features.

So to give you some perspective, I've been trying to implement a seamlessly- integrated forum on this site for about 2 months now. I first started playing with it over the Christmas holidays and have been experimenting with it off-and-on ever since.

The problem is that I have been spoiled by the relative ease of integrating the SMF forum into Joomla 1.0. There is a very good extension available on that platform and, despite having to hack the core, it works near-flawlessly. Once i did some custom coding to have the forum URLs rewritten to be huma-readable, I was in the money. If you've ever been to the JCal Pro forums, you'll know what i am talking about. 

Based on my past experience then, here are the minimum requirements for a properly integrated forum:

I've just read an interesting "anti-joomla" article called "How to choose the right CMS". While I don't agree with the broad-stroked advice of the author regarding Joomla, I was intrigued by some of the promising new CMS options out there.

In particular, I liked the look of Concrete5 CMS and the"What is concrete5" demo video got me even more interested after just the first 60 seconds.