Last week I met up again with David Towers for our semi regular lunch time gossip.

David has recently returned from a trip to the West African country of Ghana and it was great to hear all about his trip.

Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to achieve independence from a Western imperial power, in 1957, and lies on the Prime Meridian so is one of the few countries that is in the same time zone as me, here in the UK.

It is also the second largest producer of Cocoa and one of the world's top gold producers.

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Tesco is the third largest retailer in the world just behind Wal-Mart and Carrefour.

When a global company with annual profits exceeding £3billion per year adopts Joomla! you know it's not about the price.

Today they announced the launch of their online learning portal, AcademyOnline, for over 400,000 staff around the world using Joomla and Moodle.

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Did you know - there will be no comments in Joomla 1.6?

Joomla 1.6 was slated to have three big features

1. Nested Categories
2. ACL
3. Comments
   

Recently in an IRC chat Andrew Eddie confirmed that "comments" will not be in Joomla 1.6

As the explanation of what I feel is a major announcement is buried in a comment, how ironic is that, on that irc chat.

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We all hopefully know that joomla is a misspelling of a swahili word meaning "all together" but do you know how we chose that name or what the cms formerly known as mambo could have been called.

At the recent Joomla!Day in the Netherlands I gave my recollections of the turbulent and traumatic process involved.

Sadly I was doing most of this by memory as I no longer have any of my own records from that time, but Arno, Jean-Marie and Johan helped to fill in some of the gaps.

I'll be making this presentation again at J&Beyond later this month and maybe by then I may have filled in a few more gaps.

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Wow! what a couple of weeks.

It all started with the "ash cloud" and several days spent in a fruitless search trying to find an alternative route to JoomlaDay in the Netherlands.

For a while it looked like I wouldn't make it but right at the last moment the airlines convinced the governments of Europe that it was perfectly safe to fly through a cloud of volcanic debris.

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Earlier today I read a tweet that led me to a web page that led me to another web site that finally dropped me into spending 25 minutes watching a video on Vimeo.

Now I'm not usually a great watcher of online videos, especially when I'm travelling and on a dodgy 3G internet connection but something about this presentation grabbed my attention.

If I could be bothered I would spend some time summarising the video and abstracting the key points. But as you should know by now I'm lazy and don't like to repeat things if I really don't have to.

So grab a coffee, some nice biscuits, settle down in a comfortable seat and watch the presentation.

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Almost a year a go I wrote a proposal for a "Joomla Supporters Club"

Unfortunately perhaps the timing wasn't right and despite positive comments from the Joomla community the idea sadly fell on deaf ears.

Which suprised me as it was one of the most read items on this blog in the year

In the last few weeks several people have contacted me about trying again.

So never being one to give up at the first attempt I'm making another attempt to get this off the ground.

Perhaps now is the right time to finally get the Joomla! Supporters Club up and running.

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I've been involved with voluntary organisations for over 25 years, either as a volunteer, employee or organiser.

Every organisation has suffered from the same problems: lack of volunteers, volunteer burn-out, missing skills and cliques.

The problem usually arises when a new task/team/role is created and the default option is to look at the existing pool of volunteers and asking some of them to take on the task. Without consideration of them having the required skills, or importantly available time, just that they are already "known people".

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It's a busy time in the Joomla! event calendar right now and I'm busy preparing to make two presentations at Joomla!Days in The Netherlands and if accepted another presentation at J & Beyond.

I probably made a rod for my own back with last years Hidden Secrets presentation as I have a lot to live up to this year.

I considered making a "Hidden Secrets Part 2" but in the end settled on "What's in a name".

Hopefully I'll be able to explain where the name Joomla! comes from, what it could have been instead, why we have the ! at the end and some lessons learnt that might help you choosing a name for your company, product or child.

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