Anyone who knows me knows I have a bit of a sweet tooth and I'm a sucker for chocolate, cheesecake and ice cream. It's extremely hard for me to walk past the local gelato shop. As I yield to temptation, I'm affronted with an assortment of flavours and mix-ins. I can choose between standard or sugar cones or have it in a cup. I can tailor my order for the likes and dislikes of my family, and get serving sizes that are realistic for their appetite (or my budget). Decisions, decisions ...

As a technical writer, I think Opensource Matters is missing an important marketing opportunity by not targeting Joomla! at the professional writing community. By "professional writing community," I don't mean novelists, poets, or publishing company editors (though, Joomla! would be great for them too) - I mean professional writers in the corporate world: technical writers, instructional designers, and marketing personnel. While the professional writing community is a smaller, more-niche market than the corporate CMS market and the software development community, I have thought for some time that Joomla! could be the next "killer app" for professional writers.

The Joomla! World Conference is holding a fan art contest with our sponsor, StickerMule.com, giving community members the opportunity to get creative with the Joomla! logo. 

Joomla! Ignite is coming to the Joomla! World Conference stage in November! Here is your opportunity to inspire, educate, enlighten and entertain your colleagues!

Every so often I have some tweets in my timeline where I can watch people from Joomla! talking really bad about Wordpress. Or Drupal. Or another CMS. And most of the times, people do this because they see all the opensource CMS as opponents on something that they call "the CMS market". Now, take a seat, because here comes a shocking truth: neither Drupal nor Wordpress nor any other opensource CMS is an opponent for Joomla. 

Those of you who read joomla.org in English, have known for a few months now that there is a new initiative in place to create a Joomla certification program. This is a project in which the presence of Joomla! community members who speak Spanish is very important. It's a project being worked on by people from more than a dozen countries and several continents. It is born from the fusion of so many different experiences and marks a milestone in the creation of a quality CMS certification program for Joomla.

Seeing how are open source technologies can make a real difference in someone's life is something quite special, but see how it can help a nation to develop into the central hub for technology is just inspiring. Joomla!Day Kenya was my first visit to Africa, and I really didn't know what to expect. I had heard there was a lot of suport for Open Source technologies in Kenya and Africa as a whole, with there already being several Joomla! user groups in existence across Africa, but none in Kenya ... yet.

How international can you get? Joomla! comes in many flavours, and now it's starspangled green too. You might assume that J! has been 'international' from the start - it's in English, isn't it? - but that is, in my opinion, a fallacy. The need for something else is mirrored in the list of translations. We have more than 50 translations of J!2.5 to date.

Eden Orion likes astronomy. Specifically, he’s into telescopes. His personal website offers a complete history of the telescope, tips on buying telescopes and he even recently repaired one of Albert Einstein’s telescopes donated to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by the theoretical physicist himself. Eden also likes Joomla.

Or... How I learned about JLayouts in 10 minutes, and why contributing to the Joomla Bug Squad can be a valuable learning experience. JLayout solves the problem of hardcoded markup. JLayout provides a simple mechanism for html markup to be moved into a separate file which can then be overriden by templates.