I've always said that once you start using joomla it's like a highly addictive drug that is impossible to let go.
So when I stumbled upon this unattributed chart comparing drug dealers and geeks I just had to produce a joomla version.
The number one mistake I see with newcomers to joomla is a failure to understand the Section, Category, Article structure of content.
How many times do you see people either reject joomla or spend hours developing complicated and convoluted solutions to satisfy their desire to have nested sub-categories?
And yet the truth is you don't need them. The problem is that they are trying to match their frontend menu structure with their backend filing system.
A few weeks ago I was chatting on skype with Fotis from joomlaworks.gr discussing the merits of various different RSS news readers or aggregators.
Despite trying several neither of us really were satisfied with what we had found.
I started this blog in response to a few of my friends "demanding" I put some of my thoughts and tips & tricks down in writing.
Of course I hopped that other people would stumble upon this blog and find it interesting but I never expected the readership to grow so large so quickly to an average of 1500 visits every day.
One thing that I often disagree about with extension developers is their naming of Joomla extensions.
When marketing an extension, irrespective of it being free or commercial, the challenge is to clearly identify the product as being for joomla.
Many developers believe that to achieve this they need to name their product in the form "Joomla Newsletter". To me this is wrong and potentially confusing, as to the inexperienced user they may believe that this is a product made by the Joomla project when it isn't.
As you will have gathered by my blog posts I take the security of my joomla sites very seriously it even prompted another blogger "realise I needed to get smarter about passwords".
Even if you follow all the advice in those posts and the excellent advice in the Joomla Administrators Security Checklist you can never be too careful.
So it is no surprise that when a new security extension popped up in JED it picqued my interest.
It seams that no Joomla related blog is complete without an obligatory comparison between Joomla and Drupal.
As I've never used Drupal, and have no intention of learning it, I'm not really in a position to do a comparison.
And even if I did I am sure it would be unfairly biased as my years of experience with Joomla is bound to influence my conclusions and decisions.
After my blog post the >other day I started thinking how I could improve the portable Joomla training suite.
Currently at the start of each training session I provide the trainees with a USB stick with a suite of portable apps including XAMPP and FireFox.
This ensures that they are all running the same software and I can pre-install some sample Joomla sites to use during the training.
Unfortunately this only works for Windows users and I don't like solutions that exclude Mac or Linux users.
Today Andrew Eddie posted a useful explanation of the new ACL (Access Control) he is building for Joomla 1.6.
Whilst Andrew has tried to explain a difficult concept it was still written by a developer for developers.
So I thought I would have a go at translating it into "normal" speak.
