The developers at Joomla this week announced the release of the latest version of the open source content management system (CMS), Joomla 2.5. This latest release features many enhancements and additions including advanced search, multi-database support using SQL Server, and automatic update notifications.

The President of Open Source Matters, Ryan Ozimek, discussed the release, stating that “Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla. No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

Until this release, Joomla was only compatible with MySQL databases. This release is only the second version to adhere to the recently-adopted six-month release cycle, which began in July of 2011 with Joomla version 1.7

The company avers that other key features in Joomla 2.5 include:

• Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.
• A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming, it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

It says that Joomla 2.5 adheres to its newly-adopted six-month release cycle that began with the previous Joomla CMS release of Joomla 1.7 in July, 2011. Downloading the latest version of Joomla is the best way to ensure organizational and personal security needs are being met since it will have the most recent updates to protect against the latest security threats.

“Multi-database support is a huge step forward for Joomla, which is already powering more than 1.6 million websites worldwide. It ensures companies and organization, both large and small, will save even more money and time by adopting Joomla,” said Ryan Ozimek, President of Open Source Matters, a non-profit created to provide organization, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. “No longer will Joomla developers be tied down to a particular database or have to spend more money and time integrating other software to get Joomla to communicate with their database. This enhances Joomla’s scalability immensely.”

“We literally received thousands of pieces of input at ideas.joomla.org into what functionality should be added to Joomla 2.5, and overwhelmingly enhanced notifications and more elegant search topped the list,” said Mark Dexter of the Joomla Production Leadership Team. “In fact, the automatic notification for core and extension updates received the most votes for a feature that people wanted in 2.5. But we didn’t stop with just those two. Joomla 2.5 is a major overhaul with more than 24 new features that we have highlighted at joom.la/25features.”

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Last year at f8, Facebook revealed its Open Graph and social plugins. Shortly thereafter, privacy concerns became a major point of discussion throughout the media and around the water coolers. We all watched CEO Mark Zuckerberg sweat through interrogations over this, but ultimately the company made numerous changes until the discussion finally fizzled out a bit.

The discussion never went completely away, but privacy no longer dominated the conversation about Facebook after a while. Last week, Facebook finally held this year’s f8 event, and of course made more huge announcements, including the new Timeline feature (which still hasn’t been rolled out to everybody) and the new Open Graph, which makes apps a lot more information sharing-friendly.

Naturally, more information shared, means more privacy concerns.

The Poynter Institute says Facebook and news organizations are pushing the boundaries of online privacy and that “Facebook again my have gone too far in its quest to make privacy obsolete and that this time some news organizations could get burned by going along with it.”

Poynter Digital Media Fellow Jeff Sonderman calls out new Facebook apps like the Washington Post’s Social Reader, and similar offerings from The Guardian and The Daily, as well as Yahoo News, which is having readers sign up to have their reading activity streamed to their Facebook profile.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of such concerns since f8. Mashable founder Pete Cashmore talked about this in another article saying that he saw on Facebook that someone he knows professionally was reading articles with titles like: “Heather Morris on Breast Implants,” and “Perrey Reeves Shows Off Bikini Body.”

Big deal? Career ender? Probably not in this case, but it gives some people an icky feeling to think about everyone they’re friends with on Facebook being able to see every page they look at. And you can bet that more and more sites will rush to get on board with this new Open Graph, just as they did after last year’s f8.

Google has rolled out one extremely helpful service in the form of free, real-time Web statistics–and one expensive yet useful service, Analytics Premium.

One of the huge drawbacks of Google Analytics when compared with other Web analytics tools was that it only offered credible data from the previous day. There was no real way to track same-day stats or the impact of content shared on social media sites.

If Google has switched the feature on for you, you’ll be able to see it by switching over to the new version of Google Analytics by clicking on “New Version” in the top right-hand corner of the page. If it is enabled, you will see it by clicking on your Dashboardstab if you do it now, or your Home tab if you are trying it out next week.Google calls this Real-Time, and it may be the excuse you need to nuke your paid Web analytics solution.

Google has only turned on the feature for select users, so if you don’t see it, don’t panic. You can sign up for early access here.

Real-Time Analytics allows you to instantly track the efficacy of social media campaigns. By tagging links that you share on Facebook and Twitter with tags related to your marketing campaign, you can track the exact impact of those links. If you need to know how to do that, here’s the link.