Steve’s Blog

July 25, 2011

Joomla! Explained and Why Writing a Book is So Hard

Phew. Joomla! Explained is finally out. If you’ve written a book, you know how I feel. Phrases like “piece of cake” and “walk in the park” aren’t involved. Why Is Writing a Book So Difficult (Particularly for Web People)? Print. Oh man, the boot was on the other foot this time. If you’re a web designer, you’ve had a requests like these: “I’d like the image to be 5.4 cm high” “I have this pixel-perfect magazine ad that want translated into a website”. I’ve been guilty in the past of making light fun of print designers who try to tackle…

May 27, 2011

Some Personal and Business Updates

2011 is turning out to be a pretty busy year and I’ve got some updates to mention in just about every area of my life. Why the Updates? It all starts from the same point: we’re having a second little girl later this year. She’s due in mid-August. I naively thought that two babies wouldn’t be much more work than one. I’m already wrong.

April 11, 2011

Any good CRMs or ERPs for Online Businesses?

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to get a better handle on our business over at OSTraining.com. Since the launch early last years, things have been growing faster than my ability to analyze and understand it. It’s been a pretty sobering experience so far and I ended up experiencing some pretty eye-opening problems with all the tools out there? First, I realised once and for all that the major payment gateways are really living in the 1990s when it comes to their websites. We use PayPal and Authorize.net for payments and “wow!”, they do not make it…

January 25, 2011

The Open Source Wall Revisited: Drupal and Commercial Modules

I’ve been on record here saying that Open Source project should focus on learning from one another rather than competing. So it’s been interesting to see the Drupal community talking about commercial modules this week. It’s very similar to the discussion that took place in the Joomla community during 2007 and 2008. Back then I wrote a post detailing the experience of some friends and colleagues called “Hitting the Open Source Wall“. Earlier this week an eerily similar post started the conversation in Drupal: Is it Evil to Ask For Payment?. You can follow some of the debate by following…

January 7, 2011

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…

December 28, 2010

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…

October 21, 2010

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…

August 6, 2010

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:

July 27, 2010

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…

July 14, 2010

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…