Steve’s Blog

April 6, 2009

Joomla Day Las Vegas Recap

I’ve just arrived back from a long series of Joomla training classes on the west coast that culminated in Joomla Day Las Vegas on Saturday. Before I start to wade through the 4000+ emails in my inbox, here are some thoughts on the Vegas experience: 1) Unconference Initally I was unsure about traveling all the way to Nevada for an unconference. Part of me wondered what on earth an unconference was anyway. Even Allen Gunn who ran the day agreed that its very easy to be sceptical about a “hippy event where people talk about whatever they want”. Its also…

March 27, 2009

We’re Hiring Joomla Teachers

If you’ve been reading Alledia.com over the last few months, you’ve noticed that we’ve been working on a large new project: JoomlaTraining.com. We started with a single class in Atlanta last June and its snowballed within 9 months to occupy most of our time and business. We’ve reached the point where we’re ready to start working with teachers. We’re opening up the applications process to teachers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.. Required Background At least three years of Joomla development experience At least five years of experience as a teacher in a school, college or corporate education setting.…

March 26, 2009

America’s Top Universities Run on Joomla

This is the outcome of various Twiter conversations over the last few days. I mentioned that the University of Washington ran Joomla on lots of sites and people started tweeting back about other top colleges using Joomla. So, with a hat tip to compassdesign, zuno, corywebb, joomladaylasvegas, mozami and more, here’s what I’ve found so far: All Eight Ivy League Universities! Harvard: link Brown: link Stanford: link Columbia: link Cornell: link Dartmouth: link Princeton: link Yale: link University of Pennsylvania: link

March 24, 2009

SanDiego.com Multi-Million Dollar Domain on Joomla

A great domain name is a beautiful thing and there’s a Joomla site running on one of the best … SanDiego.com. What I particularly love about this is that the company ran the site for several years on Java. Late in 2006 they got an investment of over $1 million dollars to invest in the business … and they choose to rebuild the site with Joomla. Geo-domains are highly popular and often emerging as rivals to the local city newspapers. Here at Alledia, we’ve got a Joomla website in the planning that will run on the .com of another very…

March 17, 2009

Does Anyone Use Joomla in Seattle?

It doesn’t seem like it … In a couple of weeks, we’re doing Joomla beginner training classes up-and-down the west coast. See if you can spot the odd one out: Vancouver – March 27 … sold out Seattle – March 30 … half-full San Francisco – March 31 … sold out Los Angeles – April 1 … sold out So if you do use, or want to use Joomla in Seattle, we’re going to run a special coupon for alledia.com readers … over at joomlatraining.com, you can use “spaceneedle” for a 33% discount on our Seattle class.

March 16, 2009

Review of RSForm Pro

This is a sponsored review of the RSForm extension. For details of having your extension reviewed, please contact us. Note that a sponsored review doesn’t mean I’ll like the product, just that I’ll take the time to review it thoroughly.

March 15, 2009

Lincoln Center and NASA Both Run Joomla

Last week I was up in New York and Washington for Joomla training classes and was fortunate to meet a lot of great people using Joomla in high-profile and interesting ways. In New York we had a student from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The Lincoln Center is a huge group of buildings in downtown New York that host a dozen of the city’s highest profile arts groups including the Metropolitan Opera, Juilliard School, New York City Ballet and New York City Opera. Their main website at LincolnCenter.org runs Joomla.

March 10, 2009

Joomla Day Vegas Ups the Ante

OK – you’re probably sick of Vegas analogies by now. “Raising the stakes”, “going all in”, “upping the ante” … however you describe it, Joomla Day Las Vegas is starting to look really, really good. This is the current presenter line-up and we hope to have even more big names to announce soon:

March 10, 2009

Migrating to Joomla 1.5

Hopefully you noticed … we finally migrated this site to Joomla 1.5. It took two months of planning and then two weeks of solid work to do the migration. Why so long? The Joomla core team have done their job but third-party developers are terrible at explaining how to move their extensions from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5. Even those that bothered to write instructions still hide them as if it was their dirty socks. So, in the hope it will save someone else sometime, here are the migration instructions you’ll have a hard time finding elsewhere:

March 5, 2009

BP Uses Joomla for Energy Biosciences Institute

The EBI is a partnership between Britsh Petroleum (although it always goes by BP in the United States) plus a group of leading universities that includes the University of California, Berkeley; the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and the University of Illinois. It’s one the largest joint initiatives between a private corporation and a public university in history and has stirred some debate. They’ve just got a new Joomla site at The site was built by Isham and his team at Creative Mischief in Atlanta. They were also responsible for last year’s Burger King promotion using Joomla.