Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day, but if you teach them how to fish, then you feed them for a lifetime.

This saying is the inspiration behind our first book, Joomla! 1.5 Customization : Make Your Site Adapt to Your Needs .

When I started writing this Press release, I originally had a big, fancy intro here telling you all the great things about this book and how I wrote it just to help you get ahead. But the truth is I have a confession to make.

I wrote this book because I am lazy, and want to make my own life easier.

I was tired of wasting my time, and yours, fixing the same simple mistakes on your websites day after day. Tired of you asking me the same easy questions over and over. Tired of repeating myself a million times.

I got tired of giving out fish every day. I asked myself "Why can't you all just learn how to do these things yourselves? You are smart enough to do it, what's the problem?"

That's when I noticed that all the available Joomla! books and reference material is aimed at either total beginners or professional coders, with absolutely nothing in between, trapping many people in that void between beginner and professional developer.

So how could you know these things if there was nowhere to learn them?

Well thanks to this book there is no longer any excuse why all of you can't do these things by yourselves:

• Identify and use the right tools to speed up site development
• Set goals and a mission for your site to guide development
• Pick the right extensions for your site
• Plan and implement advanced configurations for extensions
• Modify module, plugin and component functionality to suit your needs
• Modify extension and template appearances to suit your needs
• Diagnose and fix common problems on Joomla! sites
• Market your site, via SEO, Social Marketing, and Traditional Marketing
• Monetize your site to make the maximum return

I really don't like making lots of money fixing your site and tweaking your extensions. So stop wasting your money paying developers for small tweaks, stop wasting your time trying to get support for things you can fix yourself, stop wasting your energy trying to explain your unique design and functionality needs to people.

Grab the book already, and learn how to do things faster, cheaper and exactly how you want them yourself, and lets all be happier for it!

Then I can go back to work adding fantastic new features to our extensions for you instead.

Yes, I know the book is about $30, or about $15 for the ebook. But look, I wanted you guys off my back so much that when Packt offered me an affiliate link, I said "No thanks. I just want people reading this book and doing things faster and cheaper themselves and letting me work in peace. Can you give me a discount instead? It's a lot easier to sell a discount than an affiliate link."(true story)

After much pushing and shoving, (ok, one email) they agreed to shave an extra 15% off the price of the book for you all if you use the coupon Joomla15-DC

So here is your rod, your bait, your net and your bucket. The river is that way.

As Yoda would say: "Need me, you no longer do".

Note: I am not really that annoyed, tired or angry, you know I love you guys. I just wanted something more interesting to read than a regular announcement. The book and it's benefits however, are real.

The long awaited Update to Ninjaboard is here!

 We have included many feature requests from you our members and  also sorted out several bugs.

This is just a step on the way to our major stable release, but it is a big step indeed.

Finally Online!

The new star in the Joomla! extension heaven is called Ninjaboard. The initial beta release of our new flagship component is online NOW!

A long time coming, Ninja Theme is proud to announce the release of their February Joomla template, Lexiconia. Lexiconia is a corporate styled theme, but is quite versatile and can easily fit into most website types.

For eye-candy, they have also given NinjaSlide a simple yet effective style specifically for the template.

With the recent release of Ninja Security, a lovingly written plugin by our resident security pro Uwe, we offer our members some extra peace of mind for those who wish to have it.

Ninja Security allows you to search for and temporarily block visitors who make url calls to your site containing certain strings which you can define in the plugin parameters. The preset strings contain many common strings used to perform SQL injection attacks on web sites. 

By setting the string patterns to useful combinations, you can reduce or even prevent SQL injection attacks totally.

Whenever a potential attack is blocked, designated people are sent emails indicating the content of the post and the IP from where it was posted. This allows those people to unban wrongly banned people or make permenant any bans on real hacking attempts if they wish.

In a Flurry of end of year activity, Ninja Forge has released several exciting new extensions. One of which is NinjaMonials for Joomla 1.5.

Ninjamonials allows you to quickly and easily collect and display testimonials from your sites's visitors and members.

When a customer is deciding whether to become a customer or not, one of the first and most important things they look at is your credibility.

One of the best ways to improve your credibility in the eyes of these potential customers is to provide independant testimonials from satisfied customers.

Making these testimonials available will show them that you do indeed do what you say, and will improve the confidence of the potential customers, which in turn improves the ability of your site to convert them into customers and members.

You can collect plain text testimonials, audio or even video testimonials, and Ninjamonials features integrations with several leading community components, allowing you to provide a link to a real member of your site to whom the testimonial belongs.

Ninjamonials features a simple to use component for managing your testimonials, as well as modules and plugins to display the testimonials around your site.

It also includes a built in re-captcha system, allowing you to keep down or even eliminate automated spam testimonials.

For styling, Ninjamonials includes 3 default CSS style sheets, which are easy to edit to make your own changes to. Or you can even use your template's CSS if you wish. We use the standard P tag nested in a blockquote, which is used in most major templates today.

NinjaMonials is far and away the leading testimonial solution available for Joomla.

PLEASE NOTE: Not all features have been implemented for the initial release. Video, and Audio testimonials, and community integrations are not yet complete.

A couple of days ago Ninja Forge released an amazing new extension named Ninja Site Styler . Contrary to the name, this revolutionary extension allows a lot more than just styling your site.

Ninja Site Styler currently contains the features below, and we have many more planned.

• Get performance increases by replacing or removing the uncompressed Mootools Javascript files included with Joomla 1.5 if you want
• Perform remote, one-click updates of the Joomla 1.5 core code. No more manually processing Joomla patches! This alone will save anyone with more than one Joomla! site dozens if not hundreds of hours in upgrading.
  
• Add sIFR effortlessly to your site for advanced, flash based styling of headers and links. With over 25 parameters to control your sIFR.
• Upload and add JavaScript, CSS and PHP scripts to the header of your site all from within the component, and with XHTML standards compliant code.
• Write your own JavaScript, CSS or PHP code, and have the component add it all to the header of your site, again with XHTML standards compliant code.
• Perform redirects from any page of your site to anywhere else on your site, or even elsewhere on the web.
• Add icons to your site links, indicating to your users the file type of the URL target.
• Incorporate a PNG background transparency fix for IE6 into your site if you wish.
• Add a warning message for IE6 users, requesting that they update their browser.

On top of this, our exclusive execution rule engine allows you to decide exactly which pages and for which users these styling features are executed. You can choose from:

• Selected or all Content pages.
• Selected or all component pages.
• Selected user groups.
• 8 different browers, including iPhones and Chrome.
• Include or exclude specific users.
• If AEC subscription manager is installed, AEC subscriptions.

On top of all this is a built in file management screen allowing you to upload your own sIFR fonts, JavaScript, CSS or PHP files without leaving the component interface.

All of this together makes Ninja Site Styler a unique and unmatched extension for styling and enhancing your site.