Open Questions

Last month I made some predictions for the Joomla world in 2010. Here a couple more ideas that I’ve been thinking about but haven’t yet had the courage to act on:

1) What if CMSs as We Know Them Have Peaked?

What if the CMS industry has reached its high-point and may start to receed?

Louis Landry mentioned, “I am personally looking beyond CMS because I think the traditional CMS is probably not going to be the focus of the web in the near future.”

Certainly the big 3 all seem to have plateaued during 2009:

Continue reading “Against-the-Grain Thinking for 2010”

Ho-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. As we do every year, here’s a round-up of seasonal special offers from across the Joomla world:

• Alledia – 20% off with coupon “xmas“ until Christmas Day
• Open Source Training – 20% off with coupon “xmas“ until New Years Eve
• jReviews – 10% to 20% off most products until New Years Eve
• corePHP – 10% off with “holiday09” until New Years Day
• JsIFR3 – 20% off with coupon “59275” until New Years Eve
• JoomlaJunkie – 15% off with coupon “allediaxmas” until New Years Eve
• Joomlashack – 20% back in Amazon.com coupons if you spend over $100
• Open Source Support Desk – 15% off with coupon “holiday09” until New Years Eve

Have you found other coupons or do you have one for your own product? Feel free to post them in the comments:

1) Mobile-Ready Templates and Extensions

Probably 50% of the articles and news I read now are on my phone. Morph from Prothemer.com is the first product I’ve seen to produce a really high-quality display of a Joomla site on the iPhone but expect more templates and extensions to follow their lead in 2010.

2) Venture Capital

With the money to be made in Joomla and other CMSs, I’d be shocked if more companies didn’t start accepting and growing with Venture Capital funds. Artisteer is one example of what VC money can do:

Continue reading “Predictions for the Joomla World in 2010”

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:

Continue reading “The World’s Most Popular Joomla Sites”

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
“Yo Mos, what’s gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople.”

Lyrics from Fear Not of Man by Mos Def

Continue reading “What’s Happening With Joomla?”

Ho-ho-ho, and happy holidays to everyone. Here’s a round-up of this year’s holiday offers from lots of Joomla companies.

• Alledia – 25% with coupon “allediaxmas” extended until New Years Day
• Joomla Training – 25% with coupon “allediaxmas” extended until New Years Day
• SEF Advance – 25% until New Year
• Simplweb – 33% until 300 members
• JoomlaPraise – 25% with coupon “jollyfellow” until New Year
• JoomlaBamboo – 20% with coupon “xmas08”
• JomSocial – $30 with coupon “hol8day”
• Phil Taylor – 33% off everything until New Year
• Open Source Support Desk – 10% with coupon “HOLIDAY08”
• XHTMLSuite.com – 20% with coupon “joomla-xmas-holiday” until New Year

Have you found other coupons or do you have one for your own product? Feel free to post it in the comments:

Got to be honest, as a Brit in the United States, Thanksgiving has always been a turkey of a holiday.

It always seemed like Christmas-lite a few weeks early. People watch sports, sleep, eat turkey and even listen to Christmas songs. Besides, it also messes up the school semester. Kids work for 12 weeks without a break, have Thanksgiving and then go back for just another 3 weeks. If I ever pull an Arnold Schwarzenegger and run for office, I’ll propose moving Thanksgiving to middle of October.

Anyway, this year I finally saw the point … it’s a few days off work to discover cool new resources. Rather than just get my head down and work, it was nice to just browse the web and try things out. Here’s the best of what I found:

Continue reading “Open Question: New Holiday Discoveries?”

Back at JoomlaExpo in Chicago, one guy stood up during Barrie North’s presentation and very happily announced he’d found Barrie’s tutorials so useful that he’d sent him a box of juicy steaks.

I didn’t get any food this week, but did get a big box of T-shirts
courtesy of CustomLogoUSA.com who have been SEO Club members for
several months. They’re a very friendly company from Syracuse,
New York who allow you to put your logo on all sorts of items.

So this week’s open question is …

Continue reading “Open Questions: Gifts from Customers?”

This seems like a natural follow-on to our previous questions about major companies using Joomla and Joomla sites with great rankings.

 "Do you know of any famous people using Joomla?"

I’ve decided to set the bar high again by looking only for official sites about truly famous people. A good rule of thumb is "do they have a Wikipedia entry?"

Here’s what I’ve found so far: 

Continue reading “Open Question: Famous People Using Joomla”

For a long time now I’ve recommended sh404SEF for most Joomla sites. Recently however, theres been a long post on the SEO Club Forum with users saying how much they like Artio SEF. Some reasons they gave:

• In Artio SEF you can search and filter SEF Urls in
  main ways such as by component which is awesome. In sh404sef, you can
  search…that’s it.
• In Artio SEF you can edit an existing SEF Urls,
  in 404, you can edit the text, but not the link itself.
• Artio SEF
  doesn’t have to have a specific plugin to at least attempt an SEF url
  for a component. If you have a link to an unsupported gallery component
  and your link is called "Gallery", JoomSEF will at least call that link
  /gallery.htm

Continue reading “Open Question: Artio SEF or sh404SEF?”