Brian Teeman

Oh no, what on earth is going on? I only just upgraded my sites to Joomla 1.6 and now there is Joomla 1.7. What the hell happened!!! Did I fall asleep and wake up 3 years later? 

Joomla always takes at least 3 years to release a new version, when I have to go through the heartache and misery of migrating to a new version. Now there is a new release just six months after the last. This is terrible!!! 

One of the complaints I've seen often about Joomla is that the registration process on your site doesn't gather enough data. As supplied it's restricted to asking for just the name and email address which for many people is just not enough.

As a result people have resorted to installing something like Community Builder just for the enhanced registration form without using any of the additional "social" features that Community Builder offers.

That's just using a sledgehammer to crack a nut

As many of you know I spend a large percentage of my time teaching people how to use Joomla. Sometimes that is for people who are complete Joomla virgins but more often than not it is for people who have had a Joomla web site built for them and now they want to know how to use it.

Perhaps the biggest problem these people face is that the web site they have had built for them has not been built the Joomla way. As a result the site will often have a complicated structure that is difficult to understand and manage, definitely not what Joomla is designed to be.

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.

During the Joomla!Day West event that took place at the beginning of October the Community and Production leadership teams were able to get together for several days of discussions, planning and team building.

I've been keeping an eye and ear out for some sort of reports from these events on joomla.org but haven't seen anything yet.

Suffering from JCD (more about that in a later blog post) I've managed to gather some information from the event to share here.

On the 5th anniversary of the release of Joomla 1.0 I have decided to launch a new web site.

Suprisingly it is probably only about the third or fourth site I have ever built just for myself and not a client.

HiddenJoomlaSecrets.com is the new home of all my presentations and videos, which I hope to be adding to considerably in the coming weeks and months.

You enter a crowded bar and across the room you spot a beautiful person. They're dressed in the latest fashions and they have a welcoming smile that draws you across the room to say hello.

We all know that beauty is only skin deep and that it's what's inside that really matters and yet despite that we are still attracted to the one with the stunning looks.

In the last weeks, I've taken a step back from my involvement into the Joomla project and took a good look at what we achieved. And let me say: Joomla has quite a lot of great and talented developers and basically all the work that has been done by them was good and deserves to be noted.

But I also saw, that we have huge problems. I'm not telling a secret when I'm saying that our releases are not really at a fast pace and we also didn't keep all our promises all the time...

But what is the cause of this?

The last upgrade for Joomla was the move from 1.0 to 1.5 over 3 years ago and yet we still see many, many Joomla sites running Joomla 1.0.

Why is it that - after people have bust their ass to produce a shiny new version of our product - users are so slow to upgrade?

What can be done to ensure that the same doesn't happen with the release of Joomla 1.6?

What can we do to ensure that we aren't supporting three different and incompatible releases of Joomla! on our client's web sites?

How can we ensure that all users will see the benefits of all the hard work?

..on a live site.

Thats right I really did say don't install Joomla 1.6 Beta 1 and I encourage everyone else not to as well.

How can I say that?

Am I mad?

Am I saying it's rubbish?