Joomtraders were privileged to be able to attend Adelaide's Joomla User Group meeting in March. At this latest meeting we were all blessed by the presence of Joomla! evangelist, Andrew Eddie. Andrew has been involved with the development of Joomla! since it started and is still one of the primary developers of the Joomla! Content Management System (CMS). It was clear from the time spent with Andrew that he has a passion for both the community that uses Joomla! as well as for Joomla! itself

Recently Andrew's primary focus has been to work on the newest upcoming version of Joomla!, the long awaited Joomla! 1.6. This new version promises to simplify and empower users who want to create, own or manage their own website. It has a wide range of improvements over previous versions and we are all pretty excited about it's impending release.

Joomla! is recognised as the CMS of choice by many around the world with over 10 million downloads since its initial release in 2005. Partly it's so popular because it is simple to use. Joomla! also stands out because of the huge international and highly active Joomla! community. With over 4400 extensions available from the wider community it is one of the most versatile content management systems in the world. Additionally, the Joomla! support forum is very active and has over 360,000 members and almost 2,000,000 posts.

Joomla! User Groups are always an interesting event. The Adelaide group meetings are a great chance to meet with people, some of whom are new to Joomla!, some are web developers, some are just interested in seeing what it is all about. Overall, it is a very friendly environment where anyone interested can share or listen to how this CMS is and can be of great benefit to all. We haven't been to one yet without coming away better for the experience.