Brian Teeman

I had to smile today, and boy do I need something to smile about right now.

Linux.com, which is perhaps one of the biggest sites on the net, re-launched their site under new ownership and now powered by joomla.

All those years ago when we founded joomla I don't think we coud have thought of a web site that we woud have liked to see run joomla more than this one.

Of course I just had to dig a little further to have a look and see what extensions they are using.

It's been a while since I attended an official JoomlaDay event so I'm pretty excited about the upcoming event in the Netherlands.

If you've never attended a JoomlaDay it's definitely worth your while. Learn from the experts, share your experience and best of all meet up with all the people you only know online.

The joomladay team have put together a very full programme of speakers and training sessions so there is bound to be something for everyone.

Of course there are many speakers that I look forward to hearing but I'm sure the highlight sessions of this 2 day event will be "The Hidden Secrets of Joomla" and "GASPED - a web development principle".

(Hint those are the two sessions that I will be presenting - and I said I was modest - hehe)

Detractors of Free & Open Source (FLOSS) software often accuse it of being the home of the politicaly left wing.

That is certainly not something that could be send of The Adam Smith Institute.

The Adam Smith Institute was long a favorite of Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the Conservative Party, "as the founder of free market economics".

In the last few weeks I have received numerous approaches from people who claim to have the next big thing.

With their idea they are going to storm the web and it will soon be the hottest thing, bigger than twitter, skype, youtube etc

So what do they want from me?

Even though I am known to many as Mr Gadget man I don't own an iphone. I've just never seen the point!

My windows based mobile has done everything I wanted it to do, and I already own an mp3 player and digital camera.

But today perhaps this has all changed. As someone who is regularly out on the road I rely on my portable joomla training suite to keep me intouch with the world and more importantly in control of my clients web sites.

Now Joomla! administration has finally found its way to the iPhone with J Admin Mobile (JAM!)(iTunes link).  JAM! will allow you to manage many of the core Joomla! 1.5 features right from your iPhone!

I was recommended an extension for joomla this week via twitter, so naturaly I had a look. The link provided to me was to the Joomla extensions directory where I saw that the extension was both licenced under the GPL and non-commercial.

I read the description and the reviews and it sounded promising so I hopped over to the developers web site to download it for myself and have a play.

And that is when my blood started to boil (again).

Last week I blogged about creating a large form with complex validation rules using bfForms.

But what do you do if you want to add an existing html form to your joomla site?

Perhaps you have a form created in dreamweaver, or you have purchased a form from an on-line library, or even have a form created in microsoft word that you want to add to your site.

I spend a lot of my time training people new to joomla so I think, and hope, that I have a pretty good idea of the trials and tribulations that they face.

Looking at joomla for the first time can be, for some, a daunting prospect. With so many options and so much power and flexibility it is easy to be overwhelmed and quickly drop joomla in the trash.

Fear not, joomla help is easy to find.

You would think that is a stupid question. Of course every web master wants their site to be usable by the largest number of users. And no web master wants to break the law, and there are many laws around the world that attempt to create an equal playing field.

Yes it is true that to create some of the cooler aspects of a web site in an accessible manner can be very hard but there is NO EXCUSE at all for a site to missing ALT tags.