Most any site that sees longevity on the internet will at some point need a redesign. Recently, I did this with one of my sites, and now I'd like to share my thoughts and planning going through this process.

This month we interview Stian Didriksen, lead developer of Ninjaboard, the latest Joomla! forum component from Ninjaforge. Ninjaboard is of particular interest here in the Designer's Studio as it has been constructed with design and Joomla! templates in mind.

We live in a world where we have adopted standards in the physical and material world. The software world is no different. Joomla! has also become one of the most popular CMSs in the world and yet it has ways to go before its extensions abide by the standards. But we are hopeful, as a growing number of Joomla! developers have embraced Web standards and we urge the user populace to take notice of this key attribute.

Joomla! 1.6 stable is right around the corner. With it comes an administrator interface that although significantly updated, remains largely the same as the previous interface from Joomla! 1.5. The Joomla! 1.5 admin interface was an updated version of the original Joomla! 1.0 interface, which was inherited from Mambo. One could say that we're using an interface that's been around the better part of this decade. That's an eternity in software.

At the end of every year the various design blogs that I follow come up with predictions for what they think will be trends in web design for the following year. I thought it would be a good starting point for the design section of the JCM to see how the Joomla! templates released from the various developers so far this year stack up against the predictions from the wider design community. (Please note: You can see a list of the blogs at the end of the article.)