Joomla 1.6 development is moving right along (1.6 Beta 5 was just released). We're starting to get inquiries about if/when our Joomla Administrator Templates will be made 1.6 compatible. The short answer: some of them. The bigger picture: you should be more excited about completely new admin templates.

Stainless, our most beautiful Joomla Admin Template, has gone stable! In this latest update we've added a new light theme to the mix, straight from user requests. Also per user requests we've added the option to set the header to a normal position rather than the fixed position since some users were experiencing a lag while scrolling. Lastly we decided to include all toolbar buttons in the toolbar which is fixed to the bottom of the page and scrolls with you.

We're constantly chasing down the best solutions for Joomla administrators. We firmly believe with interfaces, applications, operating systems, etc, that there is no one size fits all solution.

By getting our Admin Bundle, you're giving yourself tons of power and options for one low price.

You may love using Stainless for your own sites and AdminPraise 2 for your client sites since it's super easy to limit and customize the access and functionality.

We've put together a fun video that shows all the cool variations you get with AdminPraise:

Woohoo, AdminPad is live and ready for your iPad enjoyment! We've worked hard to create a productive and enjoyable admin user experience on the iPad and from out own tests, we feel like we've achieved fairly significant success. AdminPad includes several innovations to allow things like article editing and browser specific admin template assignment.

If you're reading this article from an iPad, stop right now and head to the AdminPad Demo to check it out yourself (AdminPad works nicely in Firefox, Safari and Chrome as well).

[More information] [Demo] [Buy Now] [Included in Admin Bundle]

Amidst all the craziness and hype with the release, I neglected actually announcing the release of our latest Joomla Admin Template - Stainless. Stainless is the next step in our Joomla Admin evolution, which sprouted from our widely loved free admin template AdminPraise Lite.

Stainless features 5 dark color themes, history breadcrumbs, session bar, pure CSS dropdown and flyout menus, popular component integration (VirtueMart, Projectfork, Sobi2, K2 and Tienda), growl notifications, shortcuts galore, quick add links, history links, auto-redirect on session timeout... I could go on :) Check it out for yourself at our live demo.

[More info] [Demo] [Buy Now] [Included in Admin Bundle]

Have you ever wanted to quickly enter an article from your Joomla control panel via your browser or on the go?

We have for a long while now, so finally decided to make a Joomla Admin Extension to do so. Quick Item Lite is completely free, GPL and ready to download (registration required).

Sometimes it seems like work shouldn't be this fun. We're we're having a blast and are well underway with AdminPad, our Joomla! iPad Administrator Template.

The Joomla community has had its fair share of discussions and debates over whether or not we (the community, not PixelPraise) should be building alternative admin templates for the software. As a whole, we can’t agree whether it causes too much confusion to be useful, or if it’s a great way to make training clients easier.

What I think most of us can agree on, though, is that our beloved CMS has a very outdated backend. One with usability concerns and unintuitive interfaces, it has been a cause for discussion for a while (ever since WordPress started their own highly intuitive re-designs, and Drupal started playing the makeover game too). Rather than wait far a solution to be proposed and discussed and built and finally implemented, we decided it was time to start making some moves on our own, and built Khepri2 (named after the current default admin template).

We've just updated Khepri2 to v1.1.4 and fixed a few annoyances in the side Component List. The default Joomla! components all use the same general icon which is not descriptive at all, so we're now echoing the title on the parent and child items Here's the updates:

• [Fixed] Correct general component icon
• [Added] Title on parent list item
• [Added] Title on child list item

We had to immediately test our Joomla! Admin Templates on the iPad this weekend, we just had too...