Compass Designs

When I have to resize an image for use on a web page, I open up Fireworks. I realize that most people don't want to buy that kind of software when they only need to to do a tiny job. Up till now I would recommend GIMP, a free open source tool.

A while ago I blogged about comparing the popularity of Drupal to Joomla, both in terms of traffic and searches. I have also been talking recently about how Joomla is becoming better suited as a blogging platform. Just today, I was messing around with Vince Wools trying to make a Joomla permalink mambot.

With my mind on blogging with Joomla right now, I thought I would compare the top platforms to Joomla and see if I could spot some new trends in the competition.

I stumbled across a Joomla dev post from last month from Wilco, one of the core devs, about a summary of the new features in the new 1.5 version of Joomla. It gives the changes in user, designer and developer features. It was a great summary and I thought I would reproduce it here for those of you that don't spend time rummaging in the Joomla dev site like I do!

I was doing my weekly grazing through the Christopher Garvis's J!Tags. An interesting thought occured to me.

A common criticism of Joomla is that its sites (i.e. templates) are not as good as a non-CMS site. Its always nice to get recognition from the design community that is based in the non-CMS world.

A couple of weeks ago Compass Design was featured on Liquid Design, a gallery to promote the use of liquid layouts in CSS based design.

There are a number of great improvements to menus in Joomla 1.5. These are focussed on providing more flexibility to template designers and making Joomla sites more accessible and W3C valid. Specifically, significant improvments have been made to bulleted lists to now allow better submenus (for things like dropdown menus) and image replacement.