Joomla User Group New England is the nicest bunch of Joomies you'd ever hope to meet. And I'm the luckiest Joomie of them all, because I get to live here and work with them!

Thank you to all of our attendees. Some of you got up at 5 AM to drive from Boston to the middle of nowhere to sit in a hellishly hot auditorium all day, but left smiling, recharged, and happy.

Thank you, as always, to Marlboro College and Marlboro College Graduate School, for the free space, the support with logistics and wireless, and the giveaways. Your constant support is a tremendous help and benefit to our group.

Six beautiful Marlboro College Graduate School women attended CMS Expo, representing Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts. Note the terrific tattoos everyone's wearing, including the penguin. We love Joomla!

Back row:

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'm the Joomla Track Leader at the CMS Expo conference, happening May 3-5, 2010, in Evanston, IL (outside of Chicago). I am so excited to be back for my 3rd Expo conference!

This time, I'll be presenting the Joomla SiteBuilder sessions, where you'll learn secrets about putting Joomla sites together and styling them.

Recently, a student of mine showed me a Twitter exchange between two prominent Joomla developers about this very phrase. The argument made was if you're good enough to actually do, you wouldn't have time to be teaching. The implied conclusion to that is if you're teaching, you clearly aren't a first rate designer/developer, and you have to teach to pay the bills.

We could carry this argument to this: if you are a first-rate designer/developer, you wouldn't have time to volunteer your services to work on the Joomla project, because you'd be too busy building sites for paying clients.

Obviously, that statement is not true. We are tremendously lucky to have very talented designers and developers volunteering their time to work on the Joomla project. If they weren't talented, Joomla wouldn't be among the top open source content management systems in the world.

Heidi and I are here in Evanston, IL, at the Hotel Orrington for CMS Expo, now through May 1. It's a very cute town, with lots of stuff within walking distance.

If you're here for Expo, be sure to drop by our booth for Joomla template cheat sheet cards and a brochure describing Marlboro College Grad School's new Certificate in Open Source Web Development.

We've also got a sale on Lynda.com DVD training! You can buy Jen's "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" or "Joomla! Advanced CSS" for just $40 -- a 20% savings over the usual $50  price. And if you want to buy both DVD's, they're just $75 together. But that's only for this conference, so hurry!

Join us for Joomla! Day New England on May 30, 2009, 9 AM to 4 PM, in Brattleboro, Vermont. The event will be held at the Marlboro College Graduate Center. Registration is $45 and includes breakfast and lunch.

Our speakers include:

• Mitch Pirtle, KickApps and Joomla co-founder
• Elin Waring, Open Source Matters president
• Rob Schley, Open Source Matters vice-president and Joomla core team developer
• Barrie North, JoomlaShack, SimplWeb, and Compass Designs, and Marlboro College Graduate Center instructor
• Barb Ackemann, Iris Lines LLC and Marlboro College Graduate Center instructor
• Jen Kramer McKibben, 4Web, Inc. and director of the Master's of Science in Information Technology at the Marlboro College Graduate Center

Topics include beginning and advanced template development, extension development, search engine marketing and social networking tools and techniques, and more information about what's happening with Joomla 1.6.

Last night at the CMS Expo awards, we won Best Joomla E-Commerce site for our work on WineMaker Magazine. Yay us; yay WineMaker! Bill is going to get our certificate scanned in so we can put it up on the site and we'll share it with you then.

I'm tickled to announce that my new videos, "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" was released at Lynda.com today. Check them out!  Starting tomorrow, there will be a live action shot of me doing the introduction. There are a few free videos, so please go click all over them and check them out. Better yet, subscribe! Lynda.com is a great resource for learning all kinds of great skills.

My second set of videos, "Joomla! Advanced CSS" will be out later, maybe in a month or two.

I'll tell you what, the excitement is sure building for this team of 4Web to attend the conference in December. We are all looking forward to meeting all sorts of experts and to sharing our insights on how we are using Joomla to enhance our clients' reputations!

Joomla is just fabulous and this conference will be an excellent opportunity to connect with others who are using such a flexible and powerful CMS. Jen, Bill and I will be in Denver on Wednesday to lead the Joomla Basics Boot Camp. Hopefully there will be others there as well so we can help get this show kicked off.

If you haven't already checked out the site http://www.cmsexpo.net.