HowToJoomla! Blog: Joomla!

I'm happy to announce that my new book, Beginning Joomla! Website Development, is now shipping if you order it from the publisher's website! It will start shipping from online retailers like Amazon later this week.

Beginning Joomla! will take the reader step-by-step through the process of building a website with Joomla! 1.5. From beginning to end, the book will explain a concept and show how that concept relates to the development of an actual sample web site the reader can access online. This book applies each concept to a real-world example every step of the way. Once a concept is explained in theory, it is then illustrated by showing how one would implement each concept in a real web site.

If you are in the Dallas area on Monday, May 11, you can come to the Dallas Joomla! User Group meeting and hear me speak about one of my favorite topics, Joomla!. We are still getting feedback from the group about specific topics to cover during the evening, but you can take this opportunity to get some free training from a Joomla! specialist (well, almost free - the group has a small fee of around $5 or $10 per meeting to cover their costs). I plan to bring a couple of copies of my upcoming Joomla! book, Beginning Joomla! Website Development to give away as door prizes, so you definitely won't want to miss it.

The Dallas Joomla! User Group is an active group that provides mentoring and training opportunities for people who are new to Joomla!, and a great community for new and veteran Joomla! users alike. Check out their Meetup.com group or their website to get more information about the group.

If you have any topic suggestions, please feel free to add them here in the comments.

Calling all Joomla! tweeters... I have just started a topic of discussion on Twitter with the tag #t10jx where I list my top 10 favorite Joomla! extensions. The whole point of this is to share what my favorite extensions are and to find out what other people's favorite extensions are. Who knows? We may all discover some new extensions we've never used before. If you love Joomla! and you are on Twitter, I would like to invite you to take part of this discussion. Remember to use the tag #t10jx so we can all track the discussion and see what everyone's favorites are.

Back in September, I gave you my first impressions of the templates in the Joomla! 1.5 template contest. Rob Schley announced today that it is time to vote for the winner, and I am pleased to see that three of my top 5 choices made the top 5.

After reviewing the top 5 candidates, I have decided to throw my support behind RedEvo_Aphelion. If you get a chance, head over and vote for your favorite template. The winning template will be included with the core distribution of Joomla! 1.5. Good luck to all 5 candidates!

I mentioned Joomla! CSS Guide several months ago as a great resource for Joomla template designers because it offered a comprehensive list of all the core CSS classes and ID's output from Joomla and its core components. I went to the site a few months ago to find that the site was off line. I got an e-mail this morning from the founder of Joomla! CSS Guide letting me know that the site is back online, so I went to check it out.

Unfortunately, the CSS guide is no longer free. Visitors to the site now must purchase a membership in the site's professional template club to gain access to the CSS guides. In my opinion, this is a huge mistake. The CSS guide is a great resource and a great way to draw traffic to the site. If the guide were free, it would attract more traffic and more potential customers for the template club.

My Advice

My advice to Joomla! CSS Guide is to make the CSS guide a free resource for anyone visiting your website. You will see an increase in traffic and more potential customers for your template club.

My advice to you is, if you feel the CSS guide and templates are worth paying for, go ahead and pay for them, but I will not be purchasing a membership.

Best of luck to Joomla! CSS Guide. I hope your business model works out for you, but I have a feeling you will be unlocking the CSS guide when you realize its value as a magnet to your site.