Since the release of Joomla 2.5 there has been a particularly annoying “duplicate template” bug that becomes clearly evident when you install or update a template. As our primary business involves templates, and as a result the vast majority of our users install templates, this has caused a great deal of confusion and consternation among our users.

This bug was identified and patched in the Joomla platform shortly after the 2.5.0 release, however, Joomla is currently at 2.5.2 at the time of this writing and this issue remains because the Joomla platfrom fix has not been merged into the Joomla CMS code. Even when this fix makes it into the Joomla CMS codebase, it will not fix the multiple duplicate database entries that result from the buggy template installer file.

For those that follow us on Twitter, or Facebook, may have seen references to a new extension we have been working on for some time. RokSprocket is a revolutionary new Joomla 2.5 only extension that has been designed to replace a variety of our existing ‘content’ modules. These include RokStories, RokTabs, RokNewsPager, RokNewsflash, RokMicronews, and basically any module in the RT arsenal that manipulates and displays articles.

What makes this such a powerful extension is that it has been built to be highly plug-able with the ability to support almost any data source. At launch we plan to include Joomla, K2, ZOO and Seblod CCKs, with more platforms being added in future releases. Alongside the plug-able platform capability, the layouts such as Tabs, Features, Headlines, and Lists, and specific themes for these layouts can easily be added via site templates.

We have been receiving lots of emails, facebook comments, and questions on the forum related to our plans for Joomla 1.5, and the upcoming release of Joomla 2.5. I thought I would take this opportunity to reiterate the planned Joomla releases cycle and our stance on supporting them.

Although the plan was to release on July 5th, we are going to push back the release of our July Joomla Template and our new extension, RokGallery, to Thursday July 7th. This delay is because there are just too many features and functionality we feel must be in the initial release.

We want to get at least IE9 support for the administrator, some minimum requirements checking, translation strings sorted, some polish on the jobs manager, and an assortment of critical bugs. We have updated all Joomla and Joomla Developer memberships and extended them again so anyone that was expiring near the 1st has been given another full week of membership. We apologize for the delay but we just don't want to ship a ground breaking extension such as RokGallery that is not up to our high standards of execution. We appreciate your patience and understanding.

If you have not heard of RokGallery yet, you can read more about it In our "Intro to RokGallery" blog post

Over the past two months we've been diligently working on the process of converting our Joomla 1.5 framework, extensions, and templates to Joomla 1.6. As we've explained in previous blog posts, this is not a trivial task and on top of our existing heavy development workload, this has taken more time than we had originally anticipated. However, we are now making great progress, and the last few major hurdles have been tackled. Today we released 9 Joomla 1.6 extensions, and we have at least 8 more that are very close to being packaged and released also.

We are pleased to announce the release our first beta of the Gantry Framework for Joomla 1.6. This was a major update and large portions of the admin were re-written to be more usable and also to better integrate with the Joomla 1.6 API. Please download and test this version with your Joomla 1.6 installations and let us know any issues or bugs that you find. You can participate in conversations with the developers via our new Google Groups-based mailing lists.

On December 14th 2010, Joomla 1.6 RC1 was released into the wild. This marked the first "Release Candidate" release after the prior 15 beta releases. The release candidate process is supposed to be a short road that leads to an eventual "Final" release in January. Due to this upcoming Joomla release we have received a lot of emails and forum posts asking about RocketTheme Joomla template releases that are compatible with Joomla 1.6. I thought I would take this opportunity to outline our thoughts regarding 1.6 and specifically what this means for RocketTheme.

Work on our MissionControl Joomla Admin template is proceeding well. Last week we released the first 0.1.0 Alpha to our club members, and today we have just released an update that contains a fair-few bug fixes and also has compatibility styling for K2 as well as RokDownloads. Hit the jump to read about the full changelog and also some information regarding 3rd party extension styling.

For an overview of MissionControl as well as bunch of great screenshots, check out the first blog in the series: MissionControl - New Joomla Admin Template

For the past month we've been working on a little "SkunkWorks" project that started off life as an experiment, but has slowly morphed into a working prototype. The idea was to create a cleaner, more flexible Administrator template that could be color-configured, and also clean up some UI elements that have long bothered us. After the jump you can see some screenshots that are from an actual 100% live but stock Joomla install. We created a few extra administrator extensions for improved user tracking that you can see on the Dahsboard.

Lately you have seen a rise in 3rd party styling being added to our templates for various popular Joomla extensions. In the past, some 3rd party Joomla extensions could disrupt the look and feel of the given template upon installation. With this in mind, our goal was to provide an increased level of compatibility with many popular 3rd party extensions such as K2, JomSocial, Virtuemart, etc.