Last night I had the pleasure of driving up to Dallas with Kyle Ledbetter (@joomlapraise) from JoomlaPraise and his wife, Melinda (@magicmarriages), for the Dallas Joomla Users Group Meetup. We had a great time talking with a group of 50+ Joomla! enthusiasts about one of our favorite topics, Joomla!

JoomlaPraise.com, started a little over a year ago by the guys at PixelPraise.com, is a relative newcomer to the Joomla! template club industry, and they've carved out a niche for themselves developing simple yet appealing templates that are not only attractive, but also what I like to call "developer friendly," meaning that they are easy to customize and easy to work with. JoomlaPraise's most recent endeavor is the release of AdminPraise 2, an updated and improved version of their first Joomla! administrator template, AdminPriase.

The original AdminPraise template really pushed the boundaries of what a Joomla! administrator template can do, and AdminPraise 2 has taken the concept even further. I have asked Kyle Ledbetter from JoomlaPraise.com to write the first ever guest post on HowToJoomla! to explain some of the top features of AdminPraise 2 and how it can benefit you in your efforts to administer your Joomla!-powered website because I believe this is a revolutionary new way to think about Joomla! administration.

If you've ever wanted more control over your Joomla! admin panel's appearance, shortcuts, menu, or acl, JoomlaPraise's AdminPraise2 is just what you need.

At first glance, AP2 is just a drastic change in the overall appearance of the admin site, but once you dig into it you'll find it's a very powerful tool.

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.

In my most recent blog post about my 10 favorite Joomla! extensions, I embedded a news feed from Twitter to show the latest posts using the #t10jx tag on Twitter. Initially, I thought about finding a plugin that handled displaying an RSS feed in an article, since that would be the easiest way to accomplish what I wanted. Then I remembered the "Load Module" plugin and the "Feed Display" module that are part of a core Joomla! installation. I realized that I could embed the feed without installing any 3rd-party extensions. Read on to find out how to do it.

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.

Another popular article on this site explains how to change your favicon in your Joomla! 1.0-powered site. Naturally, a lot of people want to know how to change your favicon in a Joomla! 1.5-powered site, so this article goes through the process of changing your favicon in a Joomla! 1.5 site.

Update July 15, 2010: I should have posted this a long time ago, but the BEST way to move your Joomla site to a new server is to use Akeeba Backup.

The most popular article on this site covers How to move your Joomla! site to a new server, but it does not cover all of the details for moving your Joomla! 1.5 site to a new server. This how-to discusses the process of moving your Joomla! 1.5 site to a new server. The information contained in this how-to also happens to be an excerpt from my upcoming book, Beginning Joomla!. (Due out in early April)