Joomla 1.6 development has been progressing at a furious pace over the last few months, past the Alpha, and towards a more stable Beta product.

But how good is it? Does it actually provide an enterprise level CMS product at the end of the day? Is the new edition actually really any value-added benefit for enterprise and government level business? Or as some have said, will it continue to be relegated to being a "hobby" project that only gets used because there are a lot of evangelists for it, and it has a lot of third party extensions attempting to meet people's needs?
 
Numerous documents have been produced internally to the Joomla team, all adding layers of complexity in order to navigate workflows based on a rewritten PHPGacl framework inside the core code for end users.

Absalom Media has been doing extensive research in parallel to this in regards to other workflow solutions. Now we can finally present our findings.

Furthering the usability discussion, and how to get the simplest manager with the least technical skill on board to manage their Joomla site, there's been a lot of movement at the station (to quote a well known Aussie larrikin and poet).

Apart from sourcing the relevant Mootools plugins, sitemap data and running through the alpha "experimental" version of Joomla 1.6, we've also continued to flesh out the entire ACL structure into something meaningful.

What do we mean by meaningful?

The codebase that is known as Joomla has been talked of implementing business processes, through access rules, since 2003 back when the product was known as Mambo 4.5.x. Now with the advent of Joomla 1.6, the real question is how to simplify such a complex model of behaviour, and business intelligence, into a software design.

The answer may be simpler than you would think.

Feeling a little overwhelmed ? A bit stuck? Managed to break your website in ways you don't understand? Your designer walked off into the distance?

For a limited time, incident reporting for Joomla, Mambo, MiaCMS and Wordpress starts at $46 dollars on a single ticket incident. Pricing for the 4 hour recharge and 8 hour recharge are also on this pricing structure.

Being in the web industry for so long, and having worked with these products for a combined total of over 30 years experience across all packages, means we can deliver high quality support for your website.

How can we do this?

Yet again the Joomla project teams have dropped the ball regarding a cross site scripting exploit. Instead of dealing with the apparent zero-day nature of the hole, they have used their political stoush to censor and limit discussion, even through the exploit is already in the wild.

In order to have a secure product, 3 specific rules are understood. These would be considered tips when designing and developing any internet based product. They are a mantra that should be drilled into any developer or designer.

Absalom Media is proud to announce a turnkey solution for your business. Catering for the Australian market, we can deliver a fully customised web presence, fully hosted for one year. This solution provides user forum feedback for your products, directory services to advertise affiliate businesses and the ability for moderation, all in a secured platform.

Too often the phenomena of social media and social networking is considered a detractor to business processes as part of overall staff morale and focus. Staff are employed to work and produce revenue for the company, not to be part of a social structure.

Yet this business mentality goes against expected psychosocial behaviour. When people congregate in a group, or are assigned to work as a team or department on a specific task, typical cognitive and social processes such as groupthink occur. To leverage these cognitive and social processes effectively helps increase business efficiency. Therefore there are grounds for a potential business case for enterprises to adopt social media and social networking.

Notice anything different?

That's right. We have a new design for this site.  It's not all that's happening either. With new toys, new web portals , new business streams and upgrades on existing software applications in the works, the Absalom Media studio is a hive of activity.

Comments, feedback, flames are all welcome. Spam and other nasty stuff will be ignored and handled by the extensive web security systems we have in place for our clientele.

The online brand of a business is something that is more than a brochure, yet some corporates treat it with kid gloves. Those who do invest in it require a return on investment that is comparable to the work delivered. Yet, at the end of the day, in order to progress business online, risks have to be taken. As a manager and creative director, I find businesses that time and again get sold short on what the aims of their website should be, based on current trends. Why is this so, and what can be done to rectify it?

One of the key factors in delivering a successful product is research and development. This research and development may take many forms, either from an engineering perspective or from a creative perspective. If a product is designed to look good, but fails to meet the use the consumer requires, it will fail. If a product is designed based on an engineering perspective alone, it usually will have a poor consumer response. So the dilemma remains. What is the best design to capture the consumer?