Steve’s Blog

August 24, 2009

One Really Busy Joomla Training Week

Its time for us to put the coffee on and get some more Red Bull … starting tomorrow we’ll have a really busy week over at Joomla Training. In total, there are 8 classes in 8 days coming up on the JoomlaTraining.com schedule, including 3 in the Mid-West, 2 in Texas and 3 in the South-East.

Mid-West

Cincinnatti Joomla All three classes are led by our expert teacher, Rod Martin. They take place at the beautiful Mets Center on the Ohio and Kentucky border, right next door the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. About four tickets are left for each of these classes:

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August 14, 2009

The End of the Bloated Joomla Template Era?

Back in October 2008 we released Bolt which we marketed as “The World’s Fastest Joomla Template”. Several other template developers asked for copies to test against their own work, but the results were clear.

Nearly 10 months later, someone has come along and beaten that mark. We’re proud of course that a company with 12 full-time template designers feels the need to compete with 2 guys working in their spare-time. I kind of wonder what took these professional developers so long? 😉

Since we released Bolt a lot of other companies such as YooTheme have worked on making their heavy templates run faster.

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August 12, 2009

Is Drupal Destined to be a Boutique CMS?

That’s the clear conclusion of the data from Google Trends.

Drupal has been substantially behind Joomla in popularity ever since the two projects were founded. WordPress has constantly grown its following and may even overtake Joomla this year, whereasDrupal has grown very slowly and steadily without ever looking likely to catch either.

Drupal is great software and powers many amazing sites, but is it destined to always be the higher-end, boutique (and yes, less-popular) cousin of WordPress and Joomla?

Comparing searches for Joomla compared the other two between 2006 and 2009:

WordPress has gone 0.66 >> 0.72 >> 0.81 >> 0.97
Drupal has gone 0.22 >> 0.25 >> 0.28 >> 0.30

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August 11, 2009

Fifty Joomla Classes and Special Student Bonuses

Time moves quickly. We did our first Joomla class in June 2008 and little more than a year later we’re approaching class number 50.

Our 49th class is in Phoenix this Friday and then the big #50 will be our beginner class in Atlanta next week. To celebrate, Christmas is coming early to our students in that 50th class. We’ve arranged for a huge bag of Joomla goodies.

If you can’t make it to Atlanta, don’t worry. At our current rate, we’ll reach class #100 around Christmas time and we’ll make sure the bonus bag for that class is even bigger and better! Here are the bonuses for our 50th class students:

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August 10, 2009

The World’s Most Popular Joomla Sites

Brian Teeman posted earlier this week about Joomla.me which tries to find the most visited Joomla sites. The results were somewhat strange with quite a few minor sites appearing high up. On closer inspection it seems that the major problem was their methodology was using Alexa.com, a notoriously unreliable guide to website traffic numbers.

So I’d like to open this up to community. What do you think are the most heavily trafficed Joomla sites? I’m particularly interested to hear from any of you with traffic numbers for large sites. Using Compete.com and data the sites have published about themselves, here’s my opening guess for the top 10 most popular sites using Joomla:

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August 10, 2009

Lifestyle Businesses or Why I Quit Web Design

There’s a Japanese show that moved to the BBC as “Dragon’s Den” and is in the U.S. now as “Shark Tank”. The format is simple: one business owner stands in front of five millionaires and tries to get investment in their company.

I watched two episodes of the BBC version last week and one phrase kept getting repeated “lifestyle business”. This meant:

Started primarily because the founder enjoyed doing what they’re doing
Depend largely on the skills of one person, with a few possible hangers-on.
Are difficult to scale in income or quantity.

Needless to say, they didn’t get investment. The more I listened, the more it sounded like the situation I was in a couple of years ago.

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July 27, 2009

Breeze – the World’s Easiest Joomla template

We don’t launch a new template very often, but when we do it needs to be special.

Back in October last year, we created Bolt which was the fastest ever Joomla template. Now we’re happy to release Breeze, which is the easiest Joomla template ever.

EASY: Breeze has exactly the same configuration as Joomla’s default Milkyway template so all you need to is upload the template and your logo. No other set-up needed!

SIMPLE: Besides the easy configuration, this is also a ridiculously fast template. Depending on how it?s configured, it can use as little as 4 HTTP requests and only 2 images.

STYLISH: Breeze is clean and professional with a slick, horizontal menu:

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July 26, 2009

The Prodigy Start Fires With Joomla

The Prodigy were the sound of England for much of the 1990s. For people of my age, growing up in the UK, only Oasis or perhaps Blur could claim to be as popular or as cool. My friends and I have a lot of good memories set to tunes like Firestarter, Voodoo People, No Good and Poison.

10 years later they’re still hanging around and their new site is built in Joomla. TheProdigy.com is a fairly straightforward but well-executed site that uses these extensions:

Jomsocial for the community
Jomcomment for the comments
RSGallery for the photos
Seyret for the videos

The template seems to be based on the JA-ZinC design from Joomlart.com, but people can choose another design for the site via the “Skins” link in the top menu.

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July 24, 2009

Special Weekend Discount on Training and Templates

It’s been a great week (and as a consequence, you might have noticed less blogging) … its was my birthday, my sister’s birthday, my wife’s birthday … oh and my sister-in-law had a baby too (Rory, on the right here)

So this weekend, from now until Sunday evening, we’re offering a special discount … use “happyweek” for a 20% discount on any of our products. It might be a template, an SEO club subscription or any of our August training classes. Offer ends just over 48 hours from now when I come down to earth again and have to go back to work on Monday morning.

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July 17, 2009

Breeze – the World’s Easiest Joomla Template

Bolt and Breeze have moved.

They are now available exclusively to members of OSTraining.com.

In addition to Bolt and Breeze, you’ll get great Joomla training classes and world-class Joomla support.

The Breeze template is like nothing you’ve ever seen before in Joomla!

It’s named “Breeze” because it’s so speedy and lightweight and because installing is a “breeze”. Here’s how to set it up:

Install Joomla
Upload Breeze
Upload your logo
Enjoy your template! It’s that easy!

Besides all the simplicity, this also a ridiculously fast template. Depending on how it?s configured, it can use as little as 4 HTTP requests and 15kb between CSS, graphics, and HTML.

6 different color options
12 different module options
Compressed, lightweight CSS
Only 2 images, both highly optimized

No hidden links
No bloated code
No conflicts with other extensions
No use of Joomla’s huge, slow Javascript file

Our goal is simplicity. We offer a 100% money-back guarantee if your copy of Breeze has script conflicts with any Joomla extension.