2011 has been a big year in the Joomla world.

The year that was ...

With the rise of Joomla template frameworks and Joomla CCK's, a new release cycle, two new Joomla versions, and download numbers hitting a staggering 27 million, Joomla's position and reach in the competitive open source CMS market hit new heights and the Joomla ecosystem itself became richer and even more diverse.

What's not in store for 2012 ... 

So in the spirit of predicting and forecasting for the year ahead - here are ten Joomla headlines that you are not likely to read on blogs and press releases in 2012.

Special mentions

With thanks to Steve Burge, TJ Baker, Corey Webb and Michel van Agtmaal for helping to curate and refine the list.

It's that time of the year again where we get to say thanks to all of our members for their support throughout the year.

The coupon "christmas" will add a 25% discount off any new subscription. In addition to this current members can add another 20% off that reduced price when they use the member coupon "jbrenewal". If you are a lapsed member you can also use the coupon "jbrenewal2" and add 10% to the reduced price.

You can see a list of plans on offer on our subscription page.

Platform is coming ...

In other news I hope to release the Platform template later on today and the aim is to have the December template available by the end of December.

Once we have Platform released I will give you all a thorough overview of why we have been so heavily delayed with the November template, but for now I'll keep my head down and keep working on releasing the Platform theme.

I have been spending a lot of my time lately, while doing design research for Joomla templates, checking to see if the website I'm viewing scales according to the browser size. I think I'm addicted to seeing the design morph and unfold as I move the browser window back and forth. I love the power of media queries.

If I'm honest I get a little disappointed when I see an awesome design that doesn't scale to match browser width these days. (Oh before you try, this design will not scale but I have a redesign in the works that will make use of media queries.)

Last week I posted how and where to check out which of our Joomla templates are compatible with Joomla 1.7 and today I thought I would point out that I have added a page where you can see which of our joomla templates are compatible with K2.

We have been diligently supporting K2 in our template releases since January 2009 and while the original claims were that K2 was Joomla 1.6 for Joomla 1.5, we think it's actually quite a lot more.

Why do you need K2 if Joomla 1.6 / Joomla 1.7 is here?

While Joomla 1.6 / Joomla 1.7 brought us acl, nested categories and other improvements, K2 offers (in my opinion) some key features in addition to these that are necessary for an all in one blogging / magazine publishing package.

Features like integrated author profile, latest comments modules, social links, image and video galleries are crucial for running and maintaining a blog. Certainly you can add some of these extra features to your Joomla site via other 3rd party offerings however K2 does this in a single package and within a single admin interface.

In my experience, yes.

I know this for sure, because one prospect contacted me and said:

You don’t know me, but I’ve been following your blog for some time. And, having seen what you’ve written about various topics, and how you interact with your readers, I’ve formed the opinion that we can do business together.

She was right.

And it sure beat the crap out of me cold-calling her.

Such explicit blogging-for-business wins are rare.

To the intense frustration of old-school marketing types, it’s very hard to calculate return on investment for social media.

Last week I made a revolutionary choice (for me anyway) and switched from using a light Textmate theme to a theme with a dark background.

In the past whenever I have fooled around with the preference settings in textmate I've always felt that there could be no way that I would choose a theme with a dark background over a light background. The high contrast of the dark background always seemed far too intense for my eyes and made it almost ridiculously hard to follow text on the page.

But now - for good or bad - I am sticking with the unmodified Textmate theme called twilight. The contrast is less severe than some of the other dark themes and it may turn out to be a useful way to make a small change in my workflow. 

In addition to our avatar competition I would like to introduce the site of the year competition.

This one is pretty self explanatory and basically involves you nominating your "best" site that you developed in the last 12 months using a Joomlabamboo template.

Once again the Joomlabamboo panel will decide on the winner and we will use such varied criteria as:

• elegance of implementation
• creativity of implementation
• level of detail
• and also whim ...

The prize for this competition will be a twelve month developer subscription valued at $195 USD. To enter all you need to do is reply to this post with a link to the site and we will do the rest.

Last year we had a little bit of end of financial year fun and gave away some free memberships to users who had the "best" avatar (as judged by our esteemed voting panel). This year I thought I would up the ante somewhat and give away developer memberships as prizes (worth $195 USD) for the best avatar.

Current, previous and free subscribers can enter the competition. You basically just need to update your profile with a new avatar of yourself that is either ...

• fun
• funny
• interesting
• strange
• or all of the above.

The avatar must also be of yourself and not one that is currently used in your profile.

Once again our panel of experts will judge the winner/s and they will be announced on the 30th June, 2011 Australian time - so make sure that you get your avatar in well before then.

If you want to enter the competition simply add a comment to this post and add your image as well as your username and we will do the rest.