With the release of Joomla! 1.6 and the decision by the Joomla! Leadership teams to move to a 6 month release cycle to help users upgrade easier, there has been a lot of speculation regarding the release of Joomla! 1.7 and how it will affect everyone.  Much of it is just that, speculation, but behind a lot of it is some reasonable concerns.  I mean, seriously, 1.6 did take almost 3 years to release, so why should 1.7 be any different?

Yesterday I was in a conversation with several other Joomla!-ers regarding this very topic.  And I noticed several things that might explain the shift in strategy for Joomla!, and also might help those wondering what is happening with Joomla! 1.7 and how they can help.

I’m not a designer.  Far from it, graphics is probably the last thing you want me doing.  But recently I had the opportunity to assist with developing a couple components and designing the user interface layouts and component workflows.  Needless to say, this was an eye opener for me.  I mean, I’ve worked in developing several components, but have never had a hand in the design of them.  Here, I was able to take all the things that I didn’t like about comparable solutions out there, and get rid of them!  Replacing them with elements and layouts that I thought flowed better and worked together well.  So here’s a couple of the things that I don’t like, and a little bit of how I approached fixing them!

I don't know about you, but when I install Joomla!, that is really just the beginning.  What follows is a unique transformation of the core Joomla! package that makes that installation an attractive, unique website.

Now a lot of the heavy lifting, and the hard work is done by Joomla! itself.  But we'd all admit that without the myriad of components, module, plugins, and templates that we add on to build our websites, all of them would look eerily similar.

To solve (part) of this problem we use templates.  Packages of graphics, and CSS magic that make our sites look cool.  If any of you are like me and lack any and all graphic artistic talent, then we utilize any of the thousands of templates pre-built for us.  And this is where the framework comes in.  To put it simply, I love them!  They make my life easy!  And here's why...