What happens in Vegas will definitely be blogged about here, because I have just signed up to attend Joomla! Day Las Vegas on April 4. I haven't yet decided if I want to attend any of the training classes on April 3, but they all look really interesting.

Joomla! Day promises to be a great event, with an A-List line-up of speakers, including multiple core developers. These events are always a great time to meet other Joomla! enthusiasts and learn a few tricks of the trade. I can't wait!

If you have a general question or comment, the best way to get an answer on this site is to join the HowToJoomla group and start a new discussion there. I will be monitoring that discussion board for new questions and comments, and I will do my best to answer each question if I can.

FeedBurner has recently announced that they are moving all of their customers' feeds to a new URL to be managed at feedburner.google.com. The old feed link for HowToJoomla should automatically forward to the new one, but you may want to update your RSS reader with the new URL.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/howtojoomla

Please note that if you are subscribed to receive RSS updates via e-mail, you do not need to change anything to continue receiving updates.

As promised, here is an article about one of the things I learned while upgrading How To Joomla to Joomla! 1.5. I have been using JomComment on How To Joomla for quite a while. You may have noticed that besides having the usual "Add Comment (2)" link at the end of each article introduction, I have also added a comment counter and link along with the "Written by...," date, section, and category, as shown in this image:

With the ability to override Joomla!'s core content output in a Joomla! 1.5 template, you can do virtually anything within your template. This tutorial demonstrates how to use template overrides to insert a JomComment comment counter anywhere you want to add it in your articles.

After over 2 years of running on Joomla! 1.0, HowToJoomla! has finally been upgraded to Joomla! 1.5. I will post more about the upgrade/migration process when I get a little more time, but in the meantime please feel free to join the HowToJoomla Community, read some how-to's, download some extensions, and read the blog

I am happy to announce that I have just put the finishing touches on a Joomla!-specific search engine at resources.howtojoomla.net. HowToJoomla! Resources started as a way to easily search Joomla!-related sites that offer useful resources to the Joomla! community. Using traditional search engines to search for terms like "templates" or "components" won't turn up Joomla!-related information, but using this search engine will because it only searches sites that offer services and resources to the Joomla! community.

If you have a site that you think should be included in the list of resources, please feel free to submit your site for consideration. Not all sites will be accepted. Only sites that provide Joomla!-related services and resources to the community will be considered.

One of the greatest things about Joomla! is the ability to customize anything you want. It even enables you to change the template that you use for the administrator back end of your site, just as easily as you can change the template for the front end of your site. The default template for the Joomla! 1.5 administrator is the culmination of countless hours of design work by Andy Miller, and it provides a great interface for managing your site. However, the brilliant minds behind Joomla! recognized that there would be possible reasons for modifying the look of the administrator interface, so they used the same template system for the back end as they use for the front end. Read on to see how to change the administrator template.

There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a web host. Usually the first things we look at are price, storage, and bandwidth, but I would argue that storage and bandwidth are mostly irrelevant as criteria for choosing a host. Buying a hosting service because it offers a huge amount of storage and bandwidth is like buying a car because it has tires. Every web host offers tons of storage and tons of bandwidth for a reasonably low price, so that really takes those two things out of the equation. Price is important, but I would also argue that it should not be the most important factor either. Read on to get some tips for what to look for in a Joomla! host.