The Bulgarian Joomla! Community is the largest CMS community in this East European country - which is joining the European Community in less than six months.

The interest in Joomla! is rapidly growing up, so the concerns have arisen about the imminent transitional problems on the way from windows-1251 to UTF-8 based sites, especially with the rise of Joomla 1.5.

DutchJoomla.org's core translator Sander Vancanneyt wrote a preview about the upcoming Joomla! 1.5. Besides a preview of lot's of great new features and the new looks of the backend, the Dutch users will be exited to see that the backend now is fully translated and ready for the (bèta) release of  Joomla! 1.5

Core team member Mitch Pirtle has hit the virtual newstands in a big way as the cover story author of this month's International PHP Magazine.

Mitch was invited to put pen to paper about forthcoming Joomla! technologies and proved a more than worthy scribe, as evidenced by landing the front page.  He manages to encapsulate a lot of technical terms into a very good read for Joomla! users of all levels of expertise.

The VirtueMartDays 2006 will be the first meeting of its kind in the Joomla! world. Although VirtueMart is just a small part of a CMS, it has brought MANY people to work with Joomla!

All VirtueMart store owners, users, developers and webmasters are invited to join us at the meeting in the Parkhotel Blub in Berlin, Germany on July, 15 and 16 (Saturday and Sunday).

One of the leaders in Joomla! documentation and tutorials, Compass Design will be focussing its website on providing quality Joomla! guides and tips through its blog.

We have hundreds of pages of great content. You may have read some of our guides, our Joomla! Template Tutorial or our Joomla! SEO Guide. These are just a taste of all the things to come.

Joomtrain provide specialised Joomla Training Services for new Administrators, teaching new users how to setup and use their Joomla website and administration section via a realtime live training session with Joomtrain staff.

Joomlaspan has published a tutorial on "How to Recover Super Administrator Status of Joomla!"

Joomla-SMF Bridge by Orstio available for download after registration at Simplemachines Community Forum is an excellent utility to integrate the superb SMF into the excellent Joomla!

Martin Bailey, author of Marketing your Business has announced the release of a book focussing specifically on the Joomla! CMS.

The book, published through Management Books 2000 Ltd is aimed and individuals and companies that are new to CMS and need help and advice understanding the benefits of a CMS (over a static HTML site, perhaps currently designed in-house) and how to implement such a system.

Joomla! 1.0.9 [ Sunshine ] is now available as of Monday 05th June 2006 18:00 UTC for download here.

We suggest that all Joomla! users upgrade to this version. 

1.0.9 contains the following changes:

• 12 Low Level Security Fixes
• 160+ General bug fixes
• Several Performance enhancements