Asaf Sabag, a Hebrew webmaster finds success with Joomla. Joomla! roadmap is what convinced me to stick with Joomla!, the next version of Joomla!, due to release very soon will have an improved RTL support and more important 100% UTF-8 compatible, and as you know these are great news for us Hebrew, right to left users. I just love hearing these stories of people who have been struggling with other nukes and CMS’s and finally found Joomla/Mambo.

In February of 2006, we should expect the release of a new Joomla Book entitled Building Websites with Joomla!. I’m curious to see how much they pack into this one. There is another book by the same author, Building Websites With Mambo : A fast paced introductory tutorial, which left much to be desired for me. If you’re looking for a quick, light, step by step procedure manual then I guess this will be enough for you.

With the way that Ajax applications have been developing, the questions of whether these applications can completely replace PC software comes to mind. Take Writely (online word processor) for instance: “People are e-mailing document attachments in order to collaborate or else, in the enterprise world, they are attempting to use wildly expensive and complicated systems - the equivalent of trying to pound in a nail with a sledgehammer,” says Jen Mazzon, Writely’s vice president of marketing.

A new Joomla user over at Soho Cascade seems to be having a bad first impression of the Joomla CMS. Basically, he’s been having some problems with the templates: I sent an email to this company wondering what the problem might be and asking for a refund of my $50 subscription if the template required a lot of configuration, which I can’t do yet. In return I got a rude little email detailing the points of their terms and conditions.

I came across an interesting article at CRM News that spoke a little' bit about online shopping for this upcoming Christmas season. RIAs are beginning to pop up all over the e-commerce world, with some notable examples being Gap, Nike (NYSE: NKE), and L.L. Bean. So far the use of AJAX and RIA in online retail tends to be limited to marketing “microsites,” usually built in Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR), which enable customers to explore a new product but not purchase it; and also for “guided selling” applications that provide some extra help in choosing the right product.

I believe that I now need to rethink the Ajax sequence on the project I am working on for work. As it stands, I had to do some interesting tinkering to make things work and emulate the console side properly. A normal sequence of GETs and POSTs would have been sufficient, except I needed something to handle server pushes. In the console application, there are some instances like popup boxes. Eg.

Alex Bosworth over at Alex Bosworth’s Weblog wrote up a nice synopsis on 10 Places you should use Ajax. There is the basic list: ** Form driven interaction.** Alex claims that forms are slow and clunky. I agree to a certain extent that Ajax can be used effectively here, but we must remember to make things painfully clear to the user. If a form looks like a form the user is going to expect it to operate like like a form.

Ok, Firefox 1.5 was finally released today from Mozilla. Um, I must say that I’m not really impressed. Well, given the types of updates that were made, most people won’t notice a huge difference. There is added support for all sorts of things like SVG, CSS 2, CSS 2, and CSS 3, however most current sites don’t make heavy use of these so we won’t be noticing anything for a while.

An interesting article from John Carroll | ZDNet.com explores the differences between AJAX and desktop development. Ajax is rapidly growing into something a lot of developers did not expect. Web designers can now design flashier web pages (minus the Flash). Other web designers are bridging the gap between desktop applications and web applications. Users have begun to take strong notice to this and are, in some cases, requesting such advances in web development.

An interesting article from ZDNet.com introduces a couple new tools for Wikipedia. The popularity of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is spawning a host of complementary tools and offshoots. One of them is called Gollum, a free Web application that creator Harald Hanek describes as a Wikipedia “browser.” The tool provides an alternate, streamlined user interface for Wikipedia that puts the search feature front and center and allows for some customization.