When household brands employ the Joomla CMS in their website projects, the entire Joomla community benefits. MTV, a household name around the world, chose to relaunch their website in Greece doing just that.

Joomla.org launches Joomla Events Site

A new section of Joomla.org dedicated to presenting local and worldwide events to the Joomla community has been launched. The new site will be used to convey information such as Joomla! Days, Joomla! Conferences and Joomla! User Group meetings.
The Joomla! Events Site

Envato, parent site of both ThemeForest and CodeCanyon which are publishers of Joomla templates and extensions respectively, has announced a competition to encourage the development of Joomla resources. Envato notes that Joomla templates and extensions are among their "most wanted file type."

Five Joomla related businesses have combined to launch a Joomla 2.5 upgrade contest. This contest is presented for Joomla website owners who would like to have their current website upgraded to version 2.5 for free.

The Joomla Extensions Directory, or JED, has been one of the most affected areas of the Joomla community after the adoption of the new Joomla release cycle which began last year. This of course directly affects users as well, as it has become difficult to know which extensions are supported in the new versions of Joomla in some cases. And when critical pieces of a website are clearly no longer supported, site administrators feel a definite strain when needing to upgrade.

Last week an announcement on Joomla.org stated that the core Joomla files had been downloaded from its site more than 30 million times. It was also stated that, "Joomla now averages around 1 million downloads every month."

The newly integrated K2 community forum, which is featured on the recently revamped K2 main website, has become the permanent home of all official member communications. Plans are to take down the old community forum on March 30, 2012.

Even after a very late start, the Joomla! Project managed to push through their application and be approved for the 2012 Google Summer of Code program. Out of 406 applications submitted, Joomla! was one of 180 open source projects chosen to participate this year.

The CMS Expo, billed as "the place to connect to where the growth is, serving enterprise, mid-tier and small business, education, government and non-profits," all within the Content Management world, will be accepting entries for the CMSA Spotlight Awards beginning March 19th.

The Joomla! Project issued a thank you to the Joomla community last week for its participation in the Joomla Pizza, Bugs and Fun global party. The event is designed to dig deeply into the Joomla Core code in order to find bugs, report them and find fixes.

The Joomla! Project has posted an official call for contributors for their push to be a part of the GSoC, or Google Summer of Code.

Google describes the Summer of Code as, "a global program that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects." The Joomla! Project is hoping to be included in this list.

This Tuesday, February 7th, countries across the world will be focusing on ways to make the internet a safer place for all users, but especially for children and young adults. The event, centered mostly in the EU, is led by Insafe, a "European network of Awareness Centres promoting safe, responsible use of the Internet and mobile devices to young people."

The theme this year is "Connecting generations and educating each other."

The community leaders behind the Joomla! Community Portal have scheduled a Pizza, Bugs and Fun event for Saturday, March 3, 2012. "Our goal is to work on coding and testing issues in the CMS Issue Tracker," organizers say. There will be code to tweak, but they are also pointing out that participants don't need to be able to write code in order to help with the testing. Documentation help is also needed.