Brian Teeman

This is the first of several blog posts inspired by my recent trip to Joomla Day in Chile.

I began my keynote presentation in Santiago with an apology that the presentation would be in English. Being British I have a very poor appreciation of the importance of speaking any language other than English. Even at school the French I was taught would not really help me with conversational French (and even then I was not a very good student).

There is an English joke that if you speak loud enough and slow enough then everyone in the world will understand you but that simply is not true.

Woody Allen made a whole movie but here you will find links to movies, presentations and articles. Thanks to the hard work of Jen Kramer and others for compiling this list of useful resources.

I will be making a presentation on Joomla! 1.6 at JoomlaDay Chile next week and will add it here. If you have any resources to add please post in the comments and I will add them.

As many of you know I spend a considerable amount of my time fixing hacked websites and in the last two days there have been two very important postings for anyone who creates or runs a Joomla! web site.

Just as you can not be a little bit pregnant your website can not be a little bit secure or a little bit unsecure. 

There are many extensions available for Joomla that "claim" to secure your site and whilst some of them will indeed block certain types of hacks none of them will make your web site unhackable.

It started at J and Beyond in 2010 when Ryan Ozimek introduced the Joomla! cheer.

I say Joomla! and you say Rocks!!

Since then Ryan has spread the cheer at Joomla!Days across the globe. I got in on the act at Joomla!Day Denmark (video) where in a live skype video link up with Joomla!Day UK the Danes raised the roof and showed the more reserved Brits how its done.

I've said it before and I will say it again - I don't like Virtuemart as software for building ecommerce sites in joomla.

A tweet of mine is even being made into a t-shirt for me and I will wear it with pride.

This week, 21st to 27th November, is Inter Faith Week in England and Wales.

Wherever I go I am always asked why I am involved in Joomla! and why I give so much of my time to a piece of software. Working together with people across the world to produce software that will help, in some small way, activities like this take place is exactly what motivates me.

Of course I am excited to see large multi-national companies and government bodies using Joomla but it is when I see small charities or non-profit organisations able to organise events and spread their message, using Joomla, that I am really happy.

This month a survey by cmscrawler.com of 2,944,914 European web sites has been able to identify the publishing solution used in almost 494,040 of those sites.

Unlike other statistical analysis this was restricted to European TLD (top level domains) and does not limit itself to only testing sites in the top x million based on traffic.

Does that make it more accurate? Probably not but by removing the traffic filter it does allow us to look at the usage of web platforms more generally.

When a client rings and says "I run a website on Mambo", one tends to run a mile & hide for a month or two hoping they will disappear.

Looking for equivalent extensions, editing JavaScript, re-doing that navigation & sorting out those templates... no one needs that hassle.

If we're happy with our websites and they work, why touch them!

Over the last few years I've given a lot of presentations and I like to think that I am quite good at it. Or at least that's what people tell me. What they say behind my back I don't know.

Unfortunately I've also seen far too many bad presentations so I thought I would take this opportunity to present my purely personal tips and advice.

Writing a blog post or any type of documentation on line is a challenge. One of the many things that I try to do is to write in a style that is appropriate for you the reader.

I am aware that for a large percentage of my readers English is not their first language. As a result I try to avoid using complex words, phrases or sentence structures. Of course I often fail but I do try.