On December 15th, the Joomla Project announced the immediate release of Joomla 1.6 release candidate 1. This release comes after a long series of beta's and a lot of hard work by the development team and bug squad.

On behalf of the whole JoomlArt team I wish you all the best for the year 2011. May most of your resolutions will get realized.

Only some hours left for most of you until the old year is gone. We would like to devote these last few hours rethinking about what has been achieved by our team and what not. We had a very ambitious plan at the beginning of 2010. We could not accomplished all our targets, but what we could is not too bad either:

If you haven’t seen the JoomlArt 2010 Recap post here on the blog, we covered alot of what JoomlArt Template Club did during the past year, but also touched on a few things we have planned for 2011. The JoomlArt Community continues to grow at a frantic pace, and we are working hard to make your experience at JoomlArt even better. Here’s some of what’s in store in the coming weeks.

Welcome Drupal 7

Tomorrow JAN 7th there will be a big Drupal 7 Release party, held on every place around the globe, in big cities and in small villages. Meetings with over 100+ enthusiasts but also little groups of 10 guys are coming together. The list of attendees may vary. But not the euphoria of an open-minded ("open-source") community of Drupal developers, themers and users to receive Drupal 7.

Joomla! 1.6 is being released today as General Availability, or in other words, Joomla 1.6.0. This is a huge milestone for the Joomla project, and JoomlArt would like to thank the entire Joomla Community for making this happen.

It has taken a lot of work, dedication, planning and execution from a lot of great minds to bring the world’s best Free and Open Source Content Management System to us, but it’s finally here!

As you may have seen, Joomla 1.6.0 Stable was released yesterday, and JoomlArt wants to make sure you have the Joomla 1.6 Components, Modules and Plugins you need to build your site using the latest Joomla release. JoomlArt has already released 22 Extensions for the Joomla 1.6.0 release, and we’re working hard to get even more extensions updated to 1.6.0. in the coming days!

The energy and excitement from the JoomlArt Community on the Joomla 1.6.0 release this week has been amazing!

JoomlArt is proud to announce 3 new contests for the JoomlArt Community Members! We’ve had some success in the past with our JoomlArt Site of the Month Contest, and our new Reloaded version promises to be bigger and better than ever with something for everyone!

JoomlArt is excited to announce our second round of Joomla 1.6 Templates on the JoomlArt T3v2 Framework. You will find 3 new templates, including JA Teline IV, JA Cloris and JA Rave in this batch of releases. Thanks for all the great feedback so far! Look for more releases next week.

JoomlArt is excited to announce third round of Joomla 1.6 Templates based on the JoomlArt T3 V2 Framework. JA Purity II ^free, Teline III and JA Ores comprises this release. Thanks for all the great feedback so far, userguides for these newly released templates will be released in their resective forum in the coming week.

We are now rolling out our 4th shipment of Templates for Joomla 1.6, based on the JoomlArt T3 V2 Framework. JA Rasite , JA Lime and JA Events comprises this release.

There has been a lot of confusion around Joomla 1.6 recently. After 3 years of heavy coding this major upgrade has been finally released in early 2011. Right now many users are wondering what 3rd party support for J1.6 will look like in the next months. Does it make any sense to start a website in J1.6 at the moment? How long should I wait until making any movements for my clients?

Finally we got it out! Surely you have noticed from the homepage that we have changed the design several days ago. Thanks to the design team for their creative effort to improve accessibility for visitors. This is a major design refinement since our Joomla site update from June 2010.

We are happy to roll out JA Edenite as last of the upgraded template for Joomla 1.6, based on the JoomlArt T3 V2 Framework. July will see regular Joomla 1.6 template being released. August onwards, we shall have templates for Joomla 1.7 and all Joomla 1.6 templates will be taken up for upgrade to Joomla 1.7 and once completed, we shall resume the upgrade of older templates to Joomla 1.7.

Recently JoomlArt has been recommended by webhostingsearch.com as BEST WEB TEMPLATE provider to their community (listed under Web Tools directory).

Great news. According to plan, Joomla 1.7 has been released today, you can get it on Joomla.org. Major enhancements in the new version include: the ability to define custom search presets, better protection against form manipulation through automatic validation, language specific font settings, and more. Upgrading is painless and takes you only ONE CLICK.

JoomlArt has a few openings for Joomla-experienced  to provide support in our Forums and Support Ticket System in full time and part time capacity.  If you are experienced with Joomla, and particularly with JoomlArt's templates and extensions, and have spare time on your hands, then this is an outstanding opportunity to join JoomlArt’s superstar moderators who help serve JoomlArt’s growing 200K+ community.

Today we are trying out something interesting. We switch on Facebook comment for the few next posts to be used parallel to our in-house comment system and want to get a feel of how users react on this move.