Of course he does. If he still has time to use the net then it's a fairly safe bet that at some point he will visit a joomla powered web site.
With Joomla being used by the UN, National Governments, leading NPO's and US Senators and Governors he surely must.
But that isn't what this blog post is really all about or why there is a photo of lion accompanying this blog post.
Wow has it really been four years since Peter Russell and I sat down and wrote the press release that announced the birth of Joomla!.
So much has changed since then and yet so much is still the same.
Happy Birthday and congratulations to everyone who was there on that day, September 1st 2005.
In 2006 Johan and myself celebrated the first bithday with a cake and a candle at the first Joomla!Day in the UK.
Will you be celebrating today or perhaps having a JUG (Joomla User Group) party?
(I really should consign that photo to the trash - it was certainly a bad hair day. )
This holiday weekend I had an enlightening conversation with a large company, that had been a training client of mine.
They got stuck on a little joomla issue with extension XXXX and just couldn't work out the problem or find the solution.
This client is pretty tech savvy and had followed most of the advice I gave in the training class.
In his now infamous book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S Raymond wrote "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch."
- Once you've started scratching does the itch go away?
- Do you reach a point where the itch has gone but the software is not complete.
- If you do what happens next?
Writing a new piece of software can be hard work and time consuming. You slave away at it in your spare time for days, weeks, months and even years until it works the way you need it to.
A few months ago I joined the dark side and bought a Mac because I had an idea to build an iPhone app for one of my largest clients.
I'm not a programmer although I like to think I am quite good at reading code and hacking it, I just don't have the skills to start from scratch.
But my app was fairly basic, really not much more than an on-line book, so how hard could it be? Surely I would be able to re-use some of the skills I have learnt over the years with Joomla.
With my shiny new Mac I downloaded the iPhone SDK, bought a few books, installed the IDE and stared at the blank screen not knowing where to start.
As with so many things in life this looked destined to be one of those ideas that never came to fruition. So I put the iPhone development on the back-burner and moved on to other projects.
When I started this blog I was not going to have any comments system at all. "Agree or disagree... I don't care" didn't really make sense if I let you comment but I was convinced otherwise.
The problem was, that I had never really found a joomla comment system that I liked. (Note I have never looked at closed source systems, or would I, so don't start telling me that product xxx does the job)
Many years ago, when I was young and innocent, I lived in a self-sufficient "closed" community but now that I am older, and more mature (?), it is more accurate to say that today I chose to "participate" or "belong" to several different communities.
In the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) the word "community" is used as a badge, often without any true understanding of what the word really means.
Joomla, like many F/LOSS projects, claims to be a community project but have you thought what that really means?
I received the following email last week
"Should we stall new clients until 1.6 is released, or build their sites on 1.5 knowing there will be some future re-work to migrate them to 1.6? Maybe we should build now on 1.5 and leave them on 1.5?"
As I was writing a reply I realised that it might be better to appear here on the blog for others to read (and perhaps even comment).
Whilst looking through the list of high traffic joomla sites at joomla.me I was disappointed, but not surprised to see that many of them were warez sites offering links to rapidshare, hotfile, megaupload etc.
Not all of these are offering joomla warez but almost every day a new warez site pops up on my google alert offering me the latest and greatest Joomla extensions and templates.
Is it worth the effort trying to close these sites down? At best all that you will really be able to achieve is to get the hosting account closed down and they will spring back up again in a few days.
If your work is being offered on these warez sites then take it as a compliment and a free advert that someone is ripping of your work and move along. I know I did.
