9 years ago today, on 17th August 2005, I was just one of seventeen brave (or foolhardy) people who announced that they were leaving the very successful Mambo project and starting out on their own. It was a snap decision and truth be told if we had stopped to think about how much work lay ahead of us in the coming months I suspect we might not have been in such a rush. We were greatly helped at the time by Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Centre and I believe we were their first "clients".
I arrived at J & Beyond not in the best of moods. I'd been off work sick for the previous month and to be honest I was tired, run down and a little depressed. There are just times when things become a constant battle of frustration and nothing seems worth the effort and that's exactly where I was. After months of preparation for JAB14 I was no longer interested and was determined that this would be my last JAB and probably my last Joomla event. Mood 0/10
I had convinced my JAB teammates to introduce two new features for 2014 and I was no longer certain that the Make it Happen or J!Factor events would be a success. I didn't see the commitment and support from the community that I felt these two initiatives deserved and as they were intended to be a major focus this year I just felt JAB would fall flat on its face together with any reputation I might have established for being involved in successful events.
Documentation in any Open Source project is seen as the Holy Grail. It's great to have but somehow never quite fulfils the needs of the users.
Joomla has an excellent documentation resource but I think it is fair to categorise these docs mainly as "reference" material and not "user guides".
Some people are able to open up a graphic editor and produce stunning original artwork for their web sites. I'm not one of those people. For me it's usually a case of searching the net in the hope of finding the perfect graphic that exactly matches my needs. Usually I fail in that search and end up with the closest thing I can find.
Yesterday was world backup day. Did you remember to take your backups? Of course you're taking them daily aren't you and not just once a year!!
Every Joomla user knows that they can use the awesome Akeeba Backup to take a backup of their site quickly and easily and even automate the process so that the backup is taken daily, with the backup archives stored in a secure off-site location.
When you went to backup your WordPress, phpBB, PrestaShop or other php/sql web site were you jealous?
The conversation about the change in licence for the Joomla Framework has clearly raised many strong opinions as well as some confusion. I admit I was confused at first regarding the version of the LGPL that was to be used as it was missing from the original post by Paul but once that was clarified I did update my post. However I believe there is one "confusion" that still can be resolved.
This is in response to a potential license change to lgpl for joomla! framework
Joomla was founded on the principle of Open Source Matters and a change to using the LGPL licence for the framework is completely against that. For those of you that don't know the LGPL allows the code to be included in proprietary, closed source software.
How does allowing people to produce closed source software with the Joomla Framework support the principle of Open Source Matters?
When I redesigned this web site earlier this month one of the challenges I faced was how to ensure that it worked as I intended it to work on multiple devices. And I didn't just wanted it to work I wanted it to look great as well.
There is not much point investing time, and perhaps money, in a design if it looks terrible on every device apart from your own. All your hard work, time and effort is wasted just because you didn't do enough testing.
Ask a Joomla web site builder why they use Joomla and the answer will most likely include "Joomla is easy, anyone can use it and you can have a site online in 5 minutes." But that's not really true.
Saying something is "easy" is a relative statement. Sure, building a web site with Joomla is easier than building a rocket to orbit the earth, but it is definitely not as easy as boiling an egg. Joomla is easy for me, and probably most of you, because you have done your research, read some documentation, watched some tutorials and most importantly have several years of experience.
So when we say "Joomla is easy" what do we really mean and are we setting the expectation for newcomers to Joomla at completely the wrong level?
