Steve’s Blog

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.…

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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.

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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.

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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…

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Recap of CMS Expo 2010

This was the third year of the CMS Expo in Chicago and it took another leap forward. Rather than getting lost in downtown or suburban Chicago they’ve moved to the suburb of Evanston, right on the lake and next to Northwestern University. It’s a good fit for a conference of 300 to 400 people. Was it worth going? Absolutely. I’ve only missed one Expo out of the four and wouldn’t make that mistake again. Here’s what stood out to me this year: More Drupal and other CMSs. Although the people and sponsors were at least 50% Joomla, this was the…

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Creating a Workflow for Drupal Users

This week’s tutorial is the second of a two-parter. We’ve had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors … blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal’s default handling of nodes. In the first part we covered how to give people easy to a list of their own nodes, using a module called workspace. In this second part we’re going to create a workflow, allowing you to choose who has control over a node. A newspaper website is a great example – a writer may submit an article which…

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Add a Discussion Forum to Joomla

Lots of websites use a discussion forum to help their users. Some websites have forums for people to chat freely on whatever topic they choose. Other websites use forums to provide support. People post their questions and staff members reply with the answer. Our choice of discussion forum for Joomla is Agora from JVitals.com. We use Agora to support our Joomla training students and in this tutorial we’re going to show you how to set it up on your site.

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New Product in the Joomla Shop: the Joola-Hoop

The Joomla team is happy to announce that they’re moving beyond T-shirts, hoodies and bags. They’ve decided that the Joomla community needs a sexier and more athletic way to show their love for Joomla. So say hello to the “Joola-Hoop”. Joomla has even been lucky enough to launch with a famous celebrity endorsement with Michelle Obama doing the Joola-Hoop dance on the White House lawn. Oh, and for you male geeks who aren’t sure if this product is right for you, we’ve been able to combine all your favorite things in just one irresistible photo:

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Drupal Users Have Their Own Workspace

This week’s tutorial is the first of a two-parter. We’ve had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors … blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal’s default handling of nodes. This week we’ll show you how to give each person their own control panel for their nodes. This will allow them to much more easily see, understand and update the content they’ve submitted. Without it they’d be reduced to searching and guessing their way through the site to find their content. Next week we’ll focus on how to…

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