Steve’s Blog

November 11, 2009

Joomla Community Fundraising for Doctors Without Borders

Brian Teeman has been working hard to put together a great idea for the Joomla community: collectively raising money for Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian aid organisation that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in danger in more than 80 countries. It seemed like such a good idea that we decided to help. How We Can Help November 18th will be the last meeting of the year for the Atlanta Joomla User Group, so we’re going try to invoke the holiday spirit a little early. This is the plan for next week’s meet-up:

November 2, 2009

Joomla 1.6 Usability Improvements

I had time to take a good look at the Alpha version of Joomla 1.6 this weekend. The Art of Joomla is doing a great job of explaining new features. I’ll also blog later about the new SEO features … they’ve taken on board of a lot our recommendations including the ability to control the metadata for each page! However, today thought I’d hightlight some nice usability improvements. Several common frustrations that beginners had with 1.5 seem to have been resolved: 1) The “Menu Manager” Has a Purpose In 1.5 beginners always expect the Menu Manager to do much more…

October 30, 2009

Non-Profit Winners Announced For 100th Class

We’re delighted to be able to announce the winners of a free ticket to our 100th Joomla training class. Last month we announced that the class in Atlanta would be free completely free to non-profit or charity organizations. We received many more applications than we had places, so this week we’ve been digging through the entries to find the winners. It was fascinating to see such a huge-cross section of society using Joomla – we had applications from groups focused housing, music, animals, education, theater, religion, cycling, tourism, families and much more. We plan on making this an annual event…

October 28, 2009

Thoughts on Drupal and the White House Website

Saturday was the biggest event for Open Source CMS systems since 2005. Back in February 2005 we had the launch of WordPress.com with super-easy installs and also WordPress 1.5 with changeable themes. Later in the year, Joomla split from Mambo. On Saturday, Drupal started powering Whitehouse.gov. It’s such a big catch that it brings hugely increased credibility, not just for Drupal, but for our Open Source CMS industry in general. If you’re not bidding for your next project by saying “this kind of software powers the White House website”, you’re crazy.

October 26, 2009

Local Joomla Installations Are Not Worth The Effort

Am I alone in thinking that we’re doing Joomla beginners a big disservice by recommending that they start with a local installation? Almost every Joomla tutorial starts with a description of how to install Joomla on your computer and it nearly always causes complete befuddlement amongst learners. Last year I had the interesting experience of agreeing to be the technical editor for a Joomla beginner book. After a brief introduction, the next 50 pages were taken up by a detailed explanation of how to install XAMPP, troubleshoot Apache and configure ports. After thoroughly intimidating the poor beginner using a PC,…

October 5, 2009

Joomla Goes CCKrazy

Apologies for the lack of blogging over the last few weeks, I’ve been wrapped up in something else since the beginning of September. Over the last couple of years, I’ve always tried to be honest with people and acknowledge that Joomla had two achilles heels: It didn’t allow a lot of control over what people can and cannot access (ACL or Access Control Level) It didn’t allow you to customize your content articles with extra fields or extra layers of categories (CCK or Content Construction Kit) Joomla’s Ecosystem is Strong If you want proof that the Joomla ecosystem is strong,…

September 23, 2009

Denver Colorado Joomla Training Class Next Week

Back to the Mile-High City … We had the great fortune to be in Denver last year as winter arrived and the CMS Expo rolled into town. We’re back again next week with one of our day-long Joomla training classes. If you need to get up to speed quickly with Joomla, consider joining us next Wednesday in Denver. The class is just south of downtown in Denver’s main tech district and its on September 30th from 9 am to 4 pm.

September 22, 2009

Aktuaya, FindWhere, Porsche and Other Great Joomla Designs

This is a guest blog post by Edward Rid from Bestjoomladesign.com. Don’t forget that the official Joomla showcase site is also available at community.joomla.org On our website we’ve been trying collect examples of sites that can be inspiring to Jooma designers. Below is a short roundup of Joomla sites that have been already submitted to us. These designs illustrate the power of Joomla.

September 17, 2009

Our 100th Joomla Class Will Be Free to Non-Profits

Over the last year our business model has evolved quite substantially. From being a traditional webdesign firm we’ve increasingly focused on Joomla training. After starting slowly last summer, we’re now holding up to 15 classes per month. We’re proud to announce that we’ve scheduled our 100th Joomla class. We’ve also decided to make it special. The 100th class will be completely free to non-profit or charity organizations.

September 16, 2009

10 Ideas for Really Popular Joomla Articles

Sometimes its hard to think of ideas for a blog post, so here are ten topics that will guarantee a really popular Joomla article: Why Drupal sucks Why WordPress sucks Why Drupal and WordPress both suck Why the GPL is great Why the GPL sucks Compare rival extensions (the developers are sure to chime in) Start charging money for a previously free extension Someone at Joomla.org doesn’t think I’m right in everything I say Someone at Joomla.org didn’t answer my email within 5 minutes of me sending it Write a useful tutorial (wait … that sounds a little too constructive…