Joomla! Community Magazine™

A new Joomla! book, Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer, is coming out next month. Its author is Jen Kramer, faculty member and program director of the Master’s of Science in Information Technology program at Vermont’s Marlboro College Graduate School. A long-time instructor, Jen teaches courses in conceptual web design, web applications, and internet marketing, and is also the co-owner of www.4webinc.com, a web development company that specializes in building highly customized Joomla! websites. Joomla! 24-Hour Trainer is Jen’s second book, coming a little more than a year after her first one, Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site.

Illustration by:  YeprJane Beyond

Perspective is a strange thing, probably best experienced less metaphorically, when drawing still life. The slightest head movement can change how an object looks - it's the same object in the same position, only our perception changes.

Being given the challenge of styling or restyling a Joomla! site can quickly mean that the erstwhile designer has to don a virtual trenchcoat and fedora to miraculously transform into a code detective. One of the most confusing things for new Joomla! users when it comes to changing a design element on a Joomla! website is trying to figure out where the code for any given style is coming from, and then of course it's another thing to then go and change the style.

NBC Los Angeles called Samantha Farrell "the best singer-songwriter you still haven't heard of," and that had to change. Her solution? A Joomla! website to integrate her music sales, performance schedule, multimedia and blog, made entirely with open source software from the Joomla! Extensions Directory.

Approximately 3000-6000 languages are spoken by humans for thousands of years. The picture shows Cuneiform, the earliest form of written expression. When I see this picture it is not that far away from the design of a website, even the ‘design’ is 5000 years old. The spoken language died out around the 18th century BC, but still today Cuneiform exists in Unicode ( U+12000–U+1236E (879 characters)  ). That means it would be possible to create a Joomla! website in Cuneiform.