The Joomla! Project is pleased to announce that the first Joomla World Conference will occur in November 2012.  We are very happy that eBay has graciously offered significant support for this event, inviting us to use their facilities in San Jose, California.

Here are the preliminary details for the Joomla! World Conference:

Date: 16th-18th November 2012

Location:
eBay Town Hall
2161 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95131
USA

Tickets: Price for a 3-day Ticket is $199 USD

More details will follow next year.

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of Joomla 2.5 Beta 1 for download. This is the second release made within the new six-month release cycle that started with the delivery of Joomla 1.6 in January 2011.

What is this release for?

There are several goals for this release:

1. To allow advance testing of sites and custom extensions so that site administrators and developers can report any problems before the final release.
2. To raise awareness that the end of the current development cycle is fast approaching.
3. To allow testing of the upgrade from version 1.7 to 2.5.0.

Click here to download.

What is this release NOT for?

This beta version of Joomla 2.5 Beta1 is not suitable for production sites. It should be used for testing only.

38 Percent Year-Over-Year Download Increase Driven by Large Developer Community Support.

Joomla, one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS) used for everything from websites to blogs to Intranets, today announced that downloads have risen 38 percent from December 2010 to December 2011. To date, Joomla has been downloaded more than 27 million times*, making it one of the most downloaded content management systems in the world.

In addition to download growth, Joomla also experienced double-digit growth in many other areas, including:

• Joomla extensions developed by outside vendors increased by 41 percent annually to 8,475 as of October 31, 201.
• The number of forum users jumped 23 percent annually as of October 31, 2011, meaning more and more people are interacting to help shape Joomla.

"We've seen double and in some cases triple digit growth in Joomla's adoption since 2007," said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. "Part of what's driven this massive number of downloads is an explosion of community involvement in the project."

More than 225,000 registered developers participate in the joomlacode.org site where open source developers work together to build extensions and the core codebase. More than 852 commercial development firms and individual developers support the more than 8,000 extensions available for Joomla. About 3,000 individuals have directly contributed to the development of the core codebase via project tools at joomlacode.org.

Joomla recently received recognition for its continued growth when Packt Publishing honored Joomla with its "Top Open Source Content Management System" award. Joomla previously won the same award, the Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2006 and also won the Packt Best PHP Open Source CMS Award 2007.

Info-Tech Research also recently praised Joomla in October 2011 calling it the "market pillar" of the Web content management market in a report. In the report, Info-Tech confirmed Joomla powers more than 1.5 million websites. These include Citibank, eBay, General Electric and many more.

*Joomla began tracking its CMS downloads in 2007, even though the system was launched in 2005. Furthermore, Joomla's open-source community only tracks English versions of downloads (Joomla is available in at least 64 languages). Considering these two factors alone, the real number of Joomla downloads is presumably much higher than 27 million.

The December issue of the Joomla Community Magazine is here:

Editor's Introduction

Joomla in the Spotlight, by Paul Orwig

Feature Stories

A Newbie Asks: What Mascot Best Represents Joomla!, by Sandra Ordonez

Mia, Who gave Everything to Everybody, by Christer Gerhardsson

Joomla Social Groups - Have you joined us yet?, by Huyen NT

Building the Future Mobile Web with Joomla!, by Andrew J. Holden

Leadership Connections

Leadership Highlights - November 2011, by Alice Grevet

Administrators Toolkit

JomSocial & K2 integration (Joomla! 1.7) - Part 1, by Grigor Mihov

Designers Studio

Top 10 Joomla! Templates for 2011, by Peter Bui

Developers Workbench

Two Awesome Examples of Mapping with Joomla!, by Andrew J. Holden

Write your own App using Joomla! Platform, by Hagen Graf

Did you know...?

The Joomla! Spanish speakers are one big family, by Willy Meléndez

This site is down for maintenance! How can I see it?, by Marian TANASE

Closed Source Complications, by John Hooley

Joomla! Events and User Groups

An Eventful Year!, by Jacques Rentzke

Joomla User Group Roundup, by Liam Mandville

Help Wanted

The Joomla! Project Wants You - December 2011, by Paul Orwig

Joomla! in the Press/Media

Joomla! in the Press/Media - December 2011, by Mark W. Bender

The Joomla! Haikus

Post your haikus for December, by Paul Orwig

In our next issue

We want to publish your Joomla! story in the next JCM issue! So take a look at our Author Resources content to get a better idea of what we are looking for, and then register to become a JCM author and submit your Joomla! story!

Joomla has won the Packt Publishing award for the top open source CMS.

Now in its sixth year, many consider the Packt Open Source Award as a top honor for an open source project. Joomla won the award based on a combination of public voting and input by a panel of judges consisting of open source luminaries.

Julian Copes of Packt Publishing said:

“Although around since 2005, Joomla really reinvented itself this year with the introduction of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7, the first product releases for the CMS since 2008. Furthermore, Joomla realized dramatic growth this year as evidenced by its number of downloads and documented government sites powered by Joomla. We are proud to honor Joomla with its third Packt Open Source Award since we launched it six years ago.”

Joomla previously won the same award, the Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2006 and also won the Packt Best PHP Open Source CMS Award 2007. Some of the milestones the open source CMS reached this year that contributed to it winning the Packt award include:

• Joomla surpassed 26 million downloads. Although it launched in 2005, this number is only from 2007 to the present since that is when Joomla began documenting downloads.
• It documented more than 2,900 government sites worldwide powered by Joomla. These include the U.S. Central Command, U.K. Ministry of Defense and many more.
• Info-Tech Research recently confirmed Joomla powers more than 1.5 million websites. These include Citibank, eBay, General Electric and many more.

Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, the not-for-profit created to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Joomla project, said:

“Joomla’s documented growth over the past year is a bi-product of our broad, diverse community spanning hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The people and open source experts have spoken with this award and we are honored that they have acknowledged what all of these people in our community passionately believe — Joomla is the absolutely best platform to power websites, Intranets and blogs.”