Jentla

JentlaThis is an inteview with Damian Hickey, the founder of Jentla, which is a large-scale multi-site product for Joomla. The Jentla team are launching the product in the U.S. at this week’s CMS Expo in Chicago.

1. Could you explain Jentla in layman’s terms?

Jentla makes it really easy to develop and manage 1,000?s of Joomla websites. Many businesses have multiple websites but they can?t gain any advantages with Joomla until they are linked together under a centralized site manager. That?s what Jentla does. Adding, approving and publishing web content works just like offline where it flows through several responsible staff.? It?s possible to place the same piece of content on multiple sites saving huge amounts of time. Managing the administration of the sites is really easy too and operations like site upgrades and extension upgrades can all be done instantly across a very large group of sites. The Joomla CMS has a short learning curve but when you add Jentla to it, it becomes easier and significantly more robust. Jenlta is also the most ambitious extension to Joomla we?re aware of, providing the Joomla development community the opportunity to compete at the enterprise level.

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Rick BlalockFor the first time, we’re expanding the classes we offer at JoomlaTraining.com beyond just beginners classes. On April 22 in Miami, Rick Blalock is teaching a Joomla template design class. He’ll take you from a your basic HTML and CSS knowledge and using hand-on examples, he’ll show how to build a fully-fledged Joomla template. The class will also run on June 18th in Atlanta.

Rick is based in Miami and runs BeautyInDesign.com which was the first place on line to give people comprehensive tuition on how to build Joomla templates. He came to my attention several years ago with some groundbreaking templates including one that looked like a computer desktop and was the forerunner of many of today’s Mootools / drag-and-drop templates.

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Barrie North

Barrie North

Recently I found out that Barrie North from Joomlashack was running a university level course in Joomla. The class is “Web 2.0 Marketing with Joomla” and I asked Barrie more about this joomla foray into higher education:

1) How did the idea for a graduate level course come about?

I think Jen McKibben originally came up with the idea. I was speaking at the New England JUG about online communities and she thought a graduate course would be great (she is a program director at Marlboro Graduate Center). Its been a long time since I have been teaching in a classroom setting, so the idea appealed to me. I think that once you are a teacher, you’ll always have that desire to educate.

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Aaron Wall

Aaron WallToday we’re delighted a have the chance to talk with Aaron Wall from SEOBook.com. Aaron’s SEO Book has been around since 2003 and he writes probably the best one-person SEO blog in the industry.

As we did here at Alledia, Aaron recently shifted his business model from pay-to-download-my-book towards a more community-based training system. His new site is built with Drupal, so we asked him about SEO and Content Management Systems:

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