Did you realized that Joomfish is one of the top 5 downloaded extensions of Joomla? A couple of days ago the Joomfish project had reached the magic number of 1.000.000 downloads on Joomlacode. As Joomlacode is not that old it counts only the downloads sine its release in 2006. In 2008 the Joomfish forum was released and today it has already more than 10.000 registered users and about 25.000 threads. All these numbers are impressive and a really good reason to celebrate a bit.

In March 2010 the Joomfish project will celebrate you, the users, supporters, contributors and all others that use Joomfish or help us to make it such a great success. End of the month we will visit the JoomlaDay Bordeaux and during the event we will release Joom!Fish 2.1 to the general public.

As it is our goal to celebrate you we start a JoomFish website contest today. Please submit your Joomfish based website in our Forum until the 15th of March 2010. After this date we will start a community voting for the best website and the winner will be announced end of March 2010. Beside a front-page article about your website more prices will be awarded. Do not miss this unique opportunity to present your work or projects of your customers, friends and organizations.

The year 2009 was a quite exciting year with presentations of JoomFish on various events, JoomlaDays and many, many talks in our forum and other places. It was our great wish to make sure the overlay map doesn't show any white spots anymore. And actually there are no more white posts on it.

The top ten list of our visitors reads quite interesting too. With Germany, Italy and France on the first places we have quite known countries. Many people and friends reach us from there. Next year I will visit the JoomlaDay France in Bordeaux (21st of March 2010) and I will definitely talk to the team from Italy about visiting them as well. In Germany we are supporting the event "J and Beyond" which is going to start on May, 30th 2010 and I'm sure this will be really exciting. The group after these top three countries includes the USA, Spain, Netherlands, Russia, Poland, Greece and Canada. I have to say this is awesome as specially Russia, Poland and Greece are countries Joomfish was never presented from one of our team yet. Something that might need to change next year - let's see if there is an event we can visit.

With in total about 3.5 Million page impressions and about 500.000 unique visitors the site has reached quite some impressive figures and we really like to thank all those of you that support us in many ways. Meanwhile we have contributions for new videos, documentation, translation and a lot of feedback for the extension itself. It is great to see how the whole JoomFish community increases and it gives us quite some responsibility to improve JoomFish even more.

For 2010 we have quite some goals to achieve. The very first priority is the public release of JoomFish 2.1 and the improvements of our documentation. We are also working on a new website design and some more additional features which are planed very soon. Stay tuned for more news, releases and events we support. And one thing will be for sure in 2010 as well. JoomFish Core will stay free and open.

The release 2.0.4 of JoomFish targets several minor issues related handling and usability as well as one important security issue that was reported recently. This is why it is highly recommended to update all your Joomfish powered websites with this latest release.

For your upgrade process you can easily install the full distribution package of JoomFish over your existing installation. Alternatively we provide several patch packages which allow an easy upgrade using FTP or other file access methods. You can find all files as well as further information to the new release on your download page.

With the release of 2.0.4 the Joomfish team will set the support for PHP4 to a deprecated status. The next release 2.1 will only support PHP5 based servers and adds the capabilities to support PHP 5.3. The next release, which is already available as pre-release for JoomFish Club members, will include several changes for the optimization of your translation process as well as better in-component documentation.

It is always astonishing how time is flying if you work in a great team. The first version of Mambelfish was published back in 2004 and with the move to Joomla the JoomFish project was born. Already back at this time Robin Muilwijk helped the project in translation of our UI and testing the solution for various languages and server scenarios. Together we developed the next (now current) generation of Joom!Fish, version 2.0. Robin was testing a lot and gave us a very useful feedback from his perspective as user and website integrator. End of the this month now Robin will leave the JoomFish core team, to focus on his family and work. He will stay connected with the project as contributor and still be around in our community. The whole team likes to thank him for his work in the core team over the past 4 years. Thanks a lot and and farewell. We hopefully see you once again on one of the events here in Europe.

With the growing community the Joomfish project is happy to have members such as Harri Susi and Carolien de Groot who are helping as moderators in our forum. Beside answering questions they also help to improve our structure and documentation of the project in various fields. We are very fortunate to announce today that Carolien will join the JoomFish core team starting with November this year. Her main focus will stay on the forum moderation and support for our club members. Beside this she will work in the fields of documentation and try to help a more complete base of tutorials, documents and information around the Joomfish project. So in the next time you can expect a growing base of information about how to use Joomfish or how to integrate Joomfish in your web solutions. If there are any ideas, suggestions you have please feel free to post us a note in our forum.