A few months ago I joined the dark side and bought a Mac because I had an idea to build an iPhone app for one of my largest clients.
I'm not a programmer although I like to think I am quite good at reading code and hacking it, I just don't have the skills to start from scratch.
But my app was fairly basic, really not much more than an on-line book, so how hard could it be? Surely I would be able to re-use some of the skills I have learnt over the years with Joomla.
With my shiny new Mac I downloaded the iPhone SDK, bought a few books, installed the IDE and stared at the blank screen not knowing where to start.
As with so many things in life this looked destined to be one of those ideas that never came to fruition. So I put the iPhone development on the back-burner and moved on to other projects.
When I started this blog I was not going to have any comments system at all. "Agree or disagree... I don't care" didn't really make sense if I let you comment but I was convinced otherwise.
The problem was, that I had never really found a joomla comment system that I liked. (Note I have never looked at closed source systems, or would I, so don't start telling me that product xxx does the job)
Many years ago, when I was young and innocent, I lived in a self-sufficient "closed" community but now that I am older, and more mature (?), it is more accurate to say that today I chose to "participate" or "belong" to several different communities.
In the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) the word "community" is used as a badge, often without any true understanding of what the word really means.
Joomla, like many F/LOSS projects, claims to be a community project but have you thought what that really means?
I received the following email last week
"Should we stall new clients until 1.6 is released, or build their sites on 1.5 knowing there will be some future re-work to migrate them to 1.6? Maybe we should build now on 1.5 and leave them on 1.5?"
As I was writing a reply I realised that it might be better to appear here on the blog for others to read (and perhaps even comment).
Whilst looking through the list of high traffic joomla sites at joomla.me I was disappointed, but not surprised to see that many of them were warez sites offering links to rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload etc.
Not all of these are offering joomla warez but almost every day a new warez site pops up on my google alert offering me the latest and greatest Joomla extensions and templates.
Is it worth the effort trying to close these sites down? At best all that you will really be able to achieve is to get the hosting account closed down and they will spring back up again in a few days.
If your work is being offered on these warez sites then take it as a compliment and a free advert that someone is ripping of your work and move along. I know I did.
How many joomla sites are there in the world? Or perhaps of more interest what percentage of successful web sites are created with joomla? And what are the Top 10 joomla sites.
The number of downloads of joomla is interesting but it doesn't really give a true figure of installations, especialy as you could use one download 100 times or just install it directly from your host.
The only way to tell is to actually sit down and count them all.
As we all know twitter has been up and down more times than a strippers panties in the last 24 hours, so what should you be doing instead.
When I was younger, a long long time ago, the BBC would always show a children's television programme in the school holidays called "Why Don't You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go Out And Do Something Less Boring Instead?" and it got me thinking of things I could be doing instead of waiting for tweets to arrive.
(I'm suprised to find out that the show ran for 42 series between 20 August 1973 and 21 April 1995 and that Russel T Davies of Doctor Who fame was a one time producer/director)
I live in Yorkshire or "God's own country", as we call it in the North of England and we do things differently here "oop north".
Good bye joomla 1.0 you've been a good friend over the years but sadly now it's time to say farewell
After over 1 million downloads of the very final release of the Joomla 1.0 it has now reached it's end of life.
There will be no further updates or security releases fro this Tuesday but what does that mean for sites that are still running Joomla 1.0?
In reality I suspect very little.
