Steve’s Blog

New Years Resolution Challenge (with thanks to Mos Def)

“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 We (are) Hip-Hop Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin So the next time you ask yourself where…

Read MoreNew Years Resolution Challenge (with thanks to Mos Def)

10 Reasons Other Open Source Projects Are Not Your Enemy

This post has been a long time coming … like almost everything on my blog these days 🙂 It’s a rant of sorts and a little over the top, but it sums up what I’ve been thinking for a while. During 2010, I’ve listened to presentations and read blogs and tweets where people have been talking about other Open Source projects as their rivals. The attitude manifests itself with comments like this: “Our CMS really needs to compete with and beat their CMS” or, “Our CMS is like wine and theirs is like Mountain Dew” This has been going on…

Read More10 Reasons Other Open Source Projects Are Not Your Enemy

The Pros and Cons of Distributions

It’s been far too long since I blogged. I’ve got a few good excuses such as a baby, a business, a book, the OSM board and almost weekly trips around the U.S. However, I’ve also got a few good topics stored up, so expect more posts in the coming weeks. First up, some thoughts on Molajo which is the shaping up to be the first widely-marketed Joomla distribution. Joomla’s had few distros before such as Non-Profit Soapbox and the pre-packaged installs put out by template clubs and extensions like Virtuemart. However, those were never really presented as distributions and that’s…

Read MoreThe Pros and Cons of Distributions

Why We Always Give Refunds

This might be the most expensive blog post I’ve ever written, but here goes … This week I was talking to a developer who sells open source products and their attitude was that they fight even single customer refund request.. I was pretty shocked – we always, always give refunds. Over at Open Source Training you can get a full refund at any point during your membership  – any point, even 5 months and 30 days into a 6 month membership. I told the developer that we’d write up a list of our reasons to see if he was convinced:

Read MoreWhy We Always Give Refunds

Joomla Usability Project Starts to Roll

A few weeks back I made a deliberately provocative post entitled “Even WordPress Usability Sucks” and ended with the suggestion that Joomla form a Usability team. It looks like one is starting to roll. Congrats to Kyle from Joomlapraise, Chris from JoomlaJunkie and the others in the Joomla UX group on people.joomla.org for getting this started. Here’s how you can help: 1) Join the people.joomla.org group and get involved. 2) Reply to Kyle’s post today with an initial set of areas to work on. 3) Check out Marco Barbosa’s Minima template. He’s been working in this area for several months…

Read MoreJoomla Usability Project Starts to Roll

Automatic Notifications of Errors on Your Joomla Site

Wonderfully smart readers … I need to pick your brains. We’ve been using Pingdom for years to track our sites. I love it. When sites go down it sends out an automatic email, SMS and even a message via an iPhone app. When our servers go down, we know. However, that’s not the same thing as saying when our sites go down, we know. This weekend a site was hit by a session error and that bought the site down. All a visitor could see was a MySQL error and the message “please repair the database”. Because the server was…

Read MoreAutomatic Notifications of Errors on Your Joomla Site

We’re Bringing Joomla and Drupal to Boston

We’ve been to over 50 cities in North America from Anchorage in Alaska to Miami in Florida. There aren’t many places left on the list of place we’d like to teach. There’s Hawaii of course (we very nearly had a client invite us there) and Puerto Rico too. However, there is one gaping hole in our U.S. coverage … Boston. No longer. Next week we’ll be in downtown Boston teaching Joomla and Drupal for 2 days each. What’s even better is that I’ll be teaching with the wonderful Jen Kramer. If you don’t know who Jen is you will shortly.…

Read MoreWe’re Bringing Joomla and Drupal to Boston

Your Thoughts on Joomla Security Extensions?

One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed. I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve’s readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.

Read MoreYour Thoughts on Joomla Security Extensions?

Even WordPress Usability Sucks

Out of all the blog posts I’ve read this year, one has stuck in my mind more than any other: Why [the] open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems. He takes on Drupal and KickApps for their lack of usability and then moves on to WordPress. He’s right. Even WordPress usability sucks. It’s generally regarded as the best of the Open Source projects in terms of usability, but even it sucks.

Read MoreEven WordPress Usability Sucks

Apologies for the Blogging Absence

My apologies for the lack of blog posts here over the last few months. Between the Open Source Matters board and getting a new company off the ground with Open Source Training it’s been a hectic year. In the last few weeks I took a working vacation to  Germany for JandBeyond and then back home to England. I’ve been blogging but my limited time and energy has gone into Joomla.org rather than here. Still, there are quite a few things I’d like to write about that aren’t appropriate for Joomla.org so look for some new articles here in the next…

Read MoreApologies for the Blogging Absence