In case you missed the official announcement Joomla 1.5.21 has been released to fix a medium level XSS injection. It's recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of Joomla if you haven't done so already.

When I first started working with Joomla four years ago I would regularly use the Fantastico one click install on my cpanel account to install Joomla. While this was a really easy way to install Joomla there was a major drawback - the Fantastico version of Joomla was routinely out of date - and sometimes a few versions out of date at that. So I would often wait days and maybe weeks before the latest version became available to update. At that time I didnt have the skill or the knowledge to update Joomla manually so I was at the mercy of my host and how quickly they implemented Fantastico updates.

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The October edition of the Joomla community magazine has just gone live and in it this month the design team have published an interview with the brains behind the new templating engine for the Ninja Board forum component. Ninja Board promises to be somewhat of a revolution for Joomla forum components which are notoriously difficult to theme.

While the stable release may still be a little while off it's great to see such effort getting put into the front end aesthetic for components for Joomla. One of my bug bears for a lot of third party components is that integrating them into the global template design is time consuming - so it's awesome to see such consideration being made from a front end point of view from one of the innovators in the joomla extension marketplace.

The interview is also worth checking out if you are curious about the Nooku framework which forms the core code framework that Ninjaboard was built upon.

You can read the full interview here.

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A few weeks ago I started talking to Parthiban Mohanraj, who you met back in May when I introduced the new Zen Grid Framework icon, about putting together a series of icons for our Joomla extensions. Up until now I've really just cobbled together a few screenshots of the extensions and put them on an angle in an attempt to be creative and while that had mostly worked for the JB site there wasn't a cohesive throughline that connected the icons.

So I've put together a brief for our major icons and thought I'd document the process here. I must say at the very outset that Parth is an incredible resource and a real dream to work with. He is fast and professional with such an incredible eye for detail that I won't hesitate to recommend him to anyone who needs icons designed - right enough of the smoke - lets dive into the process. If you need to contact Parth directly you can do so via his page over at Deviant Art.

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The very first edition of the Joomla Community Magazine has just hit the presses and judging from the responses via twitter and in the comments on the magazine it's already quite a success. There has been some amazing work done by the team in putting this complex site together and the list of authors is already very impressive.

The site design was created by our friends over at Komrade (aka Joomlaworks) and is an edgy design that fits nicely with the other official Joomla site designs. While there is still some functionality yet to be rolled out this is an awesome release and should hopefully be the base for informal, indepth and insightful reflections on using and working with Joomla from users and developers alike.

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After a slight delay the bamboo team have come up with the results of the avatar competition that we announced a few weeks ago. The voting was tight and to reflect that we have given away some smaller subscriptions for second and third place getters. But in the end the guy with the donkey won - what can we say but we like donkeys - so Id like to congratulate Lex for winning a 12 month subscription to our Joomla template club and also say a big thanks to all of the other entrants. We hope to run a similar competition in the next few months so please stay tuned.

You can check the run down of the entrants and the final result on the avatar competition forum thread.

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The Daggerfin site is pure genius and is another example of the single page folio type site that gets a lot of attention across the web galleries. I love the fading cutout css affect on this page. There are a few other sites out there that are utilising the technique but the mix of textured hand drawn stuff and this effect is great.

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[Earlier last year I experimented with posting design inspiration and general Joomlabamboo news over at the Bamboo Pixel blog. Somehow or other that blog kind of fell off my radar and as you can probably see I've been putting a lot more energy into blogging here so ... I have decided to port the design inspiration series to the JB blog. The designs that will be featured wont necessarily be based on Joomla but I will endeavour to highlight some of the non template or customised template Joomla sites that ;are out there.

So to launch things off here is my first design inspiration Crush Lovely and yes isn't it lovely :).

](http://crushlovely.com/)

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In the last week or two the Bamboo team have made a gigantic leap into the future by shifting to using a subversion repository for all of our template and extension development. And while I can hear some of you saying "well what took you so long" it is an idea that I've toyed with over the last few years but it always felt like overkill. Ive always viewed subversion as a tool for large teams and given that up until the start of last year it was really just me working on the code I didn't think it had any relevance to my workflow. In hindsight however I think I would have made the switch to using a subversion repository long ago.

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Over the last month subscribers to the Joomla Blogger newsletter have had the opportunity to get 10% off all of our subscriptions. That coupon is due to run out on the 31st March so I thought I would make that publicly available to the readers of the blog. To claim your discount simply use the coupon "jblogger6454" on the subscription page to get 10% off your new or renewed subscription.

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Ive just finished doing a handover on an old site I developed for someone a few years ago and had to start at the very start. Well not quite the turn the computer on kind of start but close enough. It got me thinking to what are the first five things you talk to a new Joomla user about? How do you break the ice for people that are completely new to the CMS concept or even just completely new to editing websites via a browser and not frontpage, dreamweaver or some other old school technology?

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Since I started putting more life into the Joomlabamboo blog I have gained a new admiration for all of the amazing Joomla blogs that Ive followed over the last few years. There are a wealth of blogs out there that talk about Joomla and sometimes its hard to know which ones to follow. I'm a bit lazy with my RSS reader and tend not to check them as often as perhaps I should, as I tend to read blogs when I feel like it, or I have time or at least when I see it tweeted and need a distraction from work.

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