Brian Teeman

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last few weeks you will know that J&Beyond took place last week in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Over the last 10 years I have attended countless Mambo, Joomla, Linux and other open source events and I'm convinced that this was the best of the lot.

It's hard to say exactly what it was that made this event the best.

 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.

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.

Yesterday I was answering a user question on the joomla forums.

It doesn't matter what it was about but the upshot was that the problem was a known issue in the latest release and that a patch had been written and approved and was ready and waiting to be included in the next release.

But it was 24 hours and a lot of testing before I realised that it was a known issue.

It's not practical for regular users to search the bug tracker for "known issues" and fixes as the tracker is less than friendly.

As the year ends rather than look backwards at what has happened in the past it's time to look forward to what will happen in the coming year.

I made such a hash of last years predictions that I hope this year I will do a lot better by stating the obvious instead of stating what I dreamed of whilst recovering from days of indulging myself on beer, food and cookies.

Here are my Top 10 Predictions for 2010 (in no particular order).

An essay on the roles and responsibilites of users and community members in an open source project.

Participation in the development of an Open Source Project is in almost all cases voluntary and traditional management cannot apply. Open Source developers are not therefore typically driven by financial motivation. Instead, consciously or not, peer esteem and a desire to acquire new skills are the driving factor.

I've blogged before about the the forgotten interface and joomla usability improvements and recommended two extensions to improve the joomla admin experience, CQI for the control panel and Advanced Administrator Menu to reorganise the menus.

Today I'd like to introduce two other "improvements" to the Joomla Administrator interface.

Together they will help you improve accessibility, usability, performance and generally make your life easier.

One of the strengths of Joomla is it's template system but this is also one of it's weaknesess. More and more the tendency for designers is to showcase as many different cool things as possible that they can achieve in a Joomla template rather than concentrate on presenting the site owner's content.