I am the manager of the Joomla! User Group New England. We had our first meeting in March 2008, and we've grown from a mailing list of 2 (Sam and me) to almost 100 people in our first year.

So, how did we do it? 

The Mechanics

In honor of the new Lynda.com Joomla Templates videos that have been released, I'm going to do a series of blog posts on cool tips and tricks for your Joomla templates.

First up, something easy: how to display your site name within the template.

The site name is entered when installing Joomla. It's used in the back end of Joomla, in the administrator screens (typically in a black bar near the top of the page).   It's used if your site is offline in the default "site is offline" display screen as well.

Happy New Year, dear readers, and Happy Birthday to 4Web!  Today we are 1 year old. And what a year it's been.

After setting up our company, we've landed a bunch of new business as well as building on old business from clients from our former freelance companies. 

Our biggest highlights of 2008 were winning the Best E-Commerce Site award at the CMS Expo conference, launching the Brew Your Own and WineMaker sites, and all of our presentations at CMS Expo.

Last night at the CMS Expo awards, we won Best Joomla E-Commerce site for our work on WineMaker Magazine. Yay us; yay WineMaker! Bill is going to get our certificate scanned in so we can put it up on the site and we'll share it with you then.

Got an email this morning announcing the new Digital Image Editor that runs inside of Joomla.   Very cool!!!  I have only tried the demo on the site, but it looks great.

It's a very basic editor that does simple things like crop, rotate, resize, flip, and apply a few filters. There's a history option so a client can go backwards if they make a mistake. That's really all a client needs to get images on their site. It's definitely not Photoshop -- but it doesn't NEED to be. This is intended for people who want to post a photo directly from the digital camera, then edit the image within Joomla, making Joomla one-stop shopping for posting content and images.

Drawback: it does save the original image and you save the edited version as another file. Downside to this is that your disk space could fill up very quickly with original pictures, particularly if they're straight off a many megapixel digital camera.

I'm tickled to announce that my new videos, "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" was released at Lynda.com today. Check them out!  Starting tomorrow, there will be a live action shot of me doing the introduction. There are a few free videos, so please go click all over them and check them out. Better yet, subscribe! Lynda.com is a great resource for learning all kinds of great skills.

My second set of videos, "Joomla! Advanced CSS" will be out later, maybe in a month or two.

With the impending end of official support for Joomla! 1.0 and as I prepare for my session at the upcoming CMS conference, I've found myself revisiting the ongoing question of whether to build sites in 1.0 or 1.5.

As a developer who has enthusiastically embraced 1.5, my knee jerk reaction is that of course (!) we should all be building new sites in 1.5 and drop 1.0 like a hot potato. How could anyone even question this? Some of the comments to the official annoucement (see here) served to remind me that there are other perspectives well worth consideration. Although I have to say, I find the comment that  "I realy[sic] hate 1.5. Its[sic] just so messy that I would send the programmes[sic] back to school and scrap the whole code" pretty much impossible to warm up to on any level. I'll just vehemently disagree with that assessment and move on to my main points.

Other, more thoughtful comments made me reconsider that knee jerk reaction. Here at 4Web, our focus is on high end, custom Joomla sites for large companies. As a developer writing the custom extensions, I have rarely seen a better - or even equally - congenial environment and API for extending and customizing a code base as I see in J!15. Things that were difficult or a struggle in J!10 are a breeze. For us and our goals, there is no question that J!15 is the way to go. Thus the knee jerk.

I really love Joomla! User Group New England. We meet the 3rd Wednesday of each month. And it's amazing what happens when you put so many intelligent people in one room -- the problems we solve!

Earlier that day, I was working on a site that had just been upgraded to Joomla 1.5.8. I noticed that a script tag I had included in a piece of content was getting stripped out when I saved the article.

Step 1: examine the wysiwyg pro settings. Wysiwyg Pro is our prefered editor for Joomla, as its usability is awesome for our clients. Of course, it hadn't been stripping out the script tag before, so why was it going now?

In conjunction with Church & Main, we've launched the new Concord Group Insurance site.

CGI is a longtime client of Church & Main.  Their previous site was static HTML. While it looked great, it wasn't possible for CGI to make their own edits.

Church & Main provided us with all graphic design direction as well as strategy for the site. We built the site based on their requirements.

Finally, after months of work, we are thrilled to announce we've launched Brew Your Own: The How-To Homebrew Beer Magazine.

This is a companion site to WineMaker Magazine, which was released earlier, in September.

BYO has been around for years, and puts out all kinds of interesting articles and resources for home beer brewers. We used a ton of extensions to make this site go, including JoomSuite Content, RS Gallery 2, MyBlog, VirtueMart, the Joomla poll and the Joomla banner module.