The month of September brings some cooler weather for some of us but for those of you Shape 5 members it brings 3 NEW modules, a Jomsocial and Kunena template! The S5 Accordion menu, the long awaited S5 Box module (which allows for up to 10 S5 Box's on one page) and S5 Register are the three new modules we released this month with Elegance. We have also included the S5 AJAX search module, the S5 Tab show and S5 Tab show copy edited to fit the Elegance theme. After many months of requests we decided to release a template with a matching forum running of off Kunena. The forum component must be downloaded from www.kunena.com but we do provide the template in the downloads area. Be sure to navigate through the demo and read up on the modules under the features drop down menu for more information.

Need a great looking template to display your images or news articles? Emma Smooth is the best choice for you! This template focuses on imagery and articles. Easily show off your great looking photos in Emma Smooth's large header area combined with the new S5 Image News Module. It comes packed with all the great features you would expect from Shape 5, custom column widths, custom background, choose your own highlight color, 4 module styles, great news layout, S5 Live Search and so much more!

Not only are you getting a great template this month but you also get our new S5 CSS and JS Compressor Plugin! This plugin compresses your site's CSS and JS files to a much smaller size and offers far more features than other compression plugins available.

The Shape 5 CSS and JS Compressor plugin is the most revolutionary and flexible compressor plugin available for Joomla! The CSS and JS Compressor increases speed and performance by compressing your site's CSS and Javascript files to much smaller sizes than the original and places them in a cache folder on your server. No data is lost during this process, just simply made smaller. So what makes our's better than the rest? One word, FLEXIBILITY! Click Read more for a full list of features or click here to be directed to the product's demo information page.

The Shape 5 Image News module gives your site a nice gallery-like image display with images directly linked to content articles! This module pulls directly from your content but focuses primarily on the image and the content is used primary for captions about the images. It comes with many extra features such as fade and fade/slide transitions, pause, play, direct article links, font sizes, padding sizes, colors, display times, image thumbnail, full height and width control and so much more!

As of December 2009 Shape 5 will be discontinuing its support of the IE6 browser for new products. This browser will be 8 years old this fall and is still in use because web developers continue to bend over backwards trying to "Hack" their sites in order for this browser to display their designs. Per http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp the percentage of IE6 users in June of 2009 was at 14.9%. We believe this will continue to drop as it started at a usage rate of 18.5% this past January. Looking at current statistics of IE6 usage we at Shape 5 feel it is time to say goodbye to this 8 year long relationship and move on. This is a growing trend among web developers; larger sites such as youtube.com have already dropped support for IE6.





There are many reasons to move away from IE6, to name a few:

- The browser is 8 years old and within this time period has been succeeded by two new versions
- From the beginning it has been subject to many security vulnerabilities, such as spyware, adware, etc and it still contains vulnerbilities
- Support for modern websites is lacking and holding back developers
- Constant "hacking" must be implemented to get a website to display equally in IE6 as it does in IE 7/8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc
- There are several free supieror browsers to choose from, firefox, safari, chrome, opera, etc

All this being said, past month we put together a little plugin to help move your users and the rest of the web away from IE6. If a user is running IE6 they will simply receive the below popup window that prompts them to upgrade their browser. You can choose to either show a close button or to force the user to upgrade and not view your site.

NOTE: This plugin will not make your site run slower or load any JS/CSS when IE6 is not running.

The following message is displayed for your users to see:

"Due to security risks and a lack of support for web standards this website does not support IE6. Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001 and it does not display modern web sites properly. Please upgrade to a newer browser to fully enjoy this site and the rest of the web."

Head on over to the free extensions area to download this plugin.