I've spent the last few days over at Joomla! and Beyond in Bad Nauheim, Germany - an international Joomla! conference which brings together Joomla! people from over 30 countries.

Although I've been involved in running Joomla! User Group Suffolk and Joomla! Day UK events for the past few years, I've never yet travelled abroad for a Joomla! event, so it was a first for me!

I've always harped on about the Joomla! community and how it was what originally drew me to Joomla! (I've probably already bored you with my stories of having to figure out from the forums what the default username was when installing Joomla! 1.0.x!) and I still stand by the fact that the community is the most important element of the JoomlaSphere.  

I came across an interesting problem with a module in Joomla! 1.7 which appeared to have available settings in the parameters of the module, but they were not showing in the back end of Joomla's administration portal.

This weekend we attended Joomla!Day UK 2011 in London, a fantastic event for all things Joomla! and a great opportunity to network with other Joomla! users. One of the popular keynote speakers was Chris Davenport, who is part of the Joomla! Leadership Team and responsible for documentation in the Joomla! project.

Almost as soon as I wrote an article about the Joomla! migration to 1.6, 1.7 or 1.8, we have the first public release of Joomla! 1.7 made available for general use.

It wasn't too long ago that people using anything other than Windows as their operating systems were considered to be geeky boffins with some innate ability to control a computer by typing in commands to a black screen and who were determined to hack the world to death with a single mouse click ..... are the tides changing?

With the long anticipated release of 1.6 in January 2011 many people are confused about whether they should be migrating now, or waiting for the anticipated 1.7 release (July 2011) or even 1.8 (January 2012).

A long time ago I wrote an article explaining how to install an update/upgrade patch for your Joomla! installation, and while a lot of the information is still perfectly relevant today, I thought it was about time to write an update, given the wide range of technologies there are available now to not only keep your site up to date, but also advise you of any changes - potentially letting you know if something untoward is happening.