Joomla! Community Magazine™

For three days this weekend, 21 members of the Joomla! project leadership met in San Jose to bond, exchange, and make plans for the future. The days were packed with many important topics. Fortunately Gunner, our facilitator, mixed the right amount of humor and physical movement as he deftly moved the agenda points along and constantly verified that each person had a chance to be heard.

Due to its simplicity, ease-of-use, scalability and popularity, Joomla! CMS seems to be gaining some ground in South African government. Despite having immense human resources and skill in Joomla! CMS, our government’s willingness to adopt this popular CMS has been a bit slow.

I (along with Sandra Warren from the Community Leadership Team) was given the distinct privilege to represent the Joomla! project at this year's Community Leadership Summit in Portland, Oregon on July 23rd and 24th. It was a great opportunity to meet other people from around the world who are all passionate about serving their open source communities and learn from their experiences.  

On June 8th, 2011 I had the opportunity to offer up some Joomla! advice via Twitter to Lexi who had hash-tagged #joomla and was struggling with some functionality of articles (com_content) and Joomla!’s “readmore” function.

On July 19th, Joomla 1.7 will be released and this version is something special because of various reasons. Before I go into details, I want to mention a few user groups.

I am no singer, nor a designer and definitely not a writer. That said I got the opportunity to write this article after the unconference at J! And Beyond 2011. It was requested by the audience that someone compile and contribute this article to the Joomla! Community Magazine, June issue.

March 2011. Ryan Ozimek is talking with the people at NASA, representing our beloved C1.5MS, when they pop “the question”. “So, yeah. The White House site is built on Drupal. Can you top that?”

The month of May marked the first anniversary of JPeople, also known as The People Site. Please join me with a look in looking back at this amazing year and celebrate the accomplishments that have happened right here in our Social Network.

The Joomla! Community is a thriving bunch of Open Source loving geeks. We share code and experiences virtually in forums, social media sites, skype chats and various places around the web each and every day. Every once in a while, we actually get together for some training and fellowship with other Joomla! community members through Joomla! User Groups and JoomlaDay events throughout the world.