Last night, the Joomla leadership announced that they were looking for request for comment on a social networking community to reside at Joomla.org.

We know it will either be called social.joomla.org or people.joomla.org. We know that it's been decided that JomSocial will run the community.

We are asked for input about whether this is something we'd use, what we want included, and how we think we'd use it.

This is a topic covered in my recent book, but the question comes up all the time.

In the early static days of the web, there was really little difference between one host and another. You uploaded a bunch of HTML pages and images (and later a CSS file or two) and the web host just worked. There wasn't a lot of analysis to do for the average small business site. One host was pretty much as good as another.

Now we're working with Joomla. And now, when it comes to hosting, everything has changed.

Chapter 15 of my new book is available for you to explore! It covers all of the usual post-launch issues, including ongoing site maintenance, upgrades, backups, and training your client how to use Joomla.

Download Chapter 15 here (PDF)

It's been way too long since I've posted, but that's because I'm spending many hours each day writing a book. Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site is due to be published in January next year by Wrox Press.

Writing a book has definitely been the most challenging project I've had for quite a while. Knowing something and teaching it are always two separate things. You have to know what you're talking about at a very deep level to really teach it well.

I've also been learning a ton about Joomla, not to mention noticing a bunch of little usability problems that I'd overlooked for years. Why, for example, is there an option to "show hits" in the menu item for a Category Blog when there's no place that hits ever actually show in that layout? Why is it called Published in the Article Manager, but Enabled in the Module Manager?