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.

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:

Article is here.

Leave politics aside for the moment, and just consider the beauty of this application.

The problem: You need to get millions of people to vote for you in an election. 

Barrie North, author of "The Joomla 1.5 book", came to lecture at my class over the weekend. We have been using his book as one of our textbooks, but he came to talk about social networking and driving traffic to your website.

He was an excellent speaker, and the students really enjoyed hearing from him. He had some great advice for SEO , and gave the students some new things  to think about.

He's blogged about it on his site.  This includes notes from his talk.