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.

I have been designing and developing websites for 10 years now, but my company, 4Web Inc., has only been around for 2 years. (Prior to that, I ran a freelance company, Focused Consulting LLC.)

Back in 4Web's infancy, my colleagues attended the very first CMS Expo in May 2008.  (I was at Adobe headquarters for an Adobe User Group Manager summit and could not attend.) Back then it was a Joomla conference mostly. The networking was great, though, and my colleagues got to meet a lot of people.

That lead to Bill, Sam, and I being asked to speak in December 2008, when the conference was held in Denver. That was my first Expo, and the networking was really wonderful. It was so great to meet fellow Joomla developers and those interested in Joomla. I had just released my first Lynda.com videos as well, which coincided with the conference, so it was a very exciting time.

I believe that Joomla is the best open source content management system out there today. It's powerful but adaptable. You don't need to know PHP to use it and accomplish amazing things with it. If you do know PHP, you can do just about anything with it. It's been downloaded over 15 million times.

But as Bill Tomczak says, there used to be two TV recording formats: Beta and VHS. Everyone knew Beta was "better". But VHS eventually won the day.

"Holy Wars" have always been with us in the tech world. Emacs vs. vi, Mac vs. Windows, WordPerfect vs. MS Word -- you name it, there's a battle. And you could argue that there's another big battle looming out there, a three-way battle: Wordpress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla.

Dancing Bear Syndrome is a term coined by Jared Spool and Alan Cooper (among others in the usability community). Someone says, "Look! A dancing bear!" And you are amazed! The bear is dancing! How cool is that?

Of course, bears don't dance well. It's just amazing that they dance at all. The novelty of it all is what catches our attention, not the quality of the dancing.

Alternative Joomla administrator templates are dancing bears.

Great news for Joomla developers! Elance, a site putting clients in touch with freelancers, says that the 8th most popular freelance skill out there is Joomla. PHP came in at #1, MySQL at #4, and WordPress and #10.

I can certainly confirm this based on how many calls for help we've gotten lately here at 4Web. We're taking projects with a September start right now -- in this economy!

 

The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits:

Joomla 1.6 alpha is ready to download.  Please remember it's NOT for production sites!!! And yes, there are a TON of bugs and problems and issues. That's why it's called an alpha.

Like it? Hate it? Have comments on it? Be sure you get involved with the Joomla Project, either on the Bug Squad or helping out in the forums. There's plenty of work to go around for everyone.

Also, remember there is a tech requirement of PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5.0.4+ in order to run Joomla 1.6. Talk to your web host to make sure these are available to you.  If you're running WAMP or XAMPP on your local machine, make sure you're running the most recent version, which will support these requirements.

My Lynda.com blog post is up, all about Joomla 1.6 alpha and what's coming next in the Joomla world.