After reviewing the responses to our survey, Gabe and I are happy to announce the entire 2010 schedule for JUG Milwaukee.

As the year proceeds, we will finalize presenters for each topic.

• 02/10 – Extension Selection & Evaluation (Vic Drover)
• 03/10 – Joomla Ecommerce – Stores, Carts, Subscriptions, Downloads and Content (Gabe Wahhab)
• 04/10 – Editors: Compare & Contrast
• 05/10 - Joomla 1.6 Features & Upgrading
• 06/10 - Must haves extensions that make your life easier
• 07/10 - Web Metrics & Analytics – How do know how well your doing if you don’t know the score.
• 08/10 – Joomla Newsletter & eMail Extensions
• 09/10 - Content Organization:
• 10/10 - Security Standards, Tips & Tricks
• 11/10 - People Management
• 12/10 – SEO: How to rank high on Google

See you all at the next JUG!

As we look back at 2010, Gabe and I are pretty impressed at what you've all done at JUG Milwaukee in 2009. We've had 12 meetings and brought in impressive speakers from around the word.

Together, we've created a Joomla community in this area where we can come to learn, share and grow. 

As we look forward to 2010 however, we know we can do better. We can bring in more relevant speakers, and we can do a better job of planning the JUG.

A few months ago I was faced with the decision of whether or not I was going to make the CMS Expo this year. We had attended last year when it was called the Joomla Expo and found it to be a great experience. This year they added a few more CMS's and a second day but also tripled the price. Yikes! With a tight budget I had a tough decision make. I ended up deciding to go and take my development team with. So last week Thursday and Friday we made  our way down to Evanston, IL for the CMS Expo.

Both days had 6 tracks that included Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco, Fundumentals, CMS Business and Power Apps. Day one had 4 one hour tracks and day two had 4 hour and a half tracks. Both days had keynote speakers some of which were incredabily boring and some of which were very interesting including original Joomla core team member and OSM board member Wilco Jansen. There were also vendor booths which didnt give away nearly as much stuff as they did last year. There was also LOTS of good food which I'm sure caused me to gain a few pounds.

I mostly attended the business tracks which included the topics of Support, SEO, ROI, Sales, Analtyics, Usability and Project Management. I must say they put together a great line up and I got exactly what I was looking for out of the expo which was a lot of new knowledge which I can use as a strong advantage against my competitors. This goes the same for my team which learned many new resources and tricks which will save them time and the company money.

There is always lots of talk about GPL and non GPL extensions in open source communities. Previously I never gave it to much thought until last week when it affected me very harshly.

GPL & non-GPL
For those of you who dont know what GPL is, it is the General Public License and it is the license Joomla and many other open source projects are released under.  The GPL states that any licensee  "is given permission to modify the work, as well as to copy and redistribute the work or any derivative version. The licensee is allowed to charge a fee for this service, or do this free of charge. This latter point distinguishes the GPL from software licenses that prohibit commercial redistribution. "

Generally speaking I have observed that most non-GPL extensions are encrypted. This means initially to install it you will have to first install a "Loader" to handle the reading and execution of the extension (more overhead). Additionally you can't see the source code to make modifications, learn from the code,  use the code to further advance the project, spurn a new project or self support for problems that arise.

In case you hadn't heard, Joomla 1.5.10 looks to be ready soon.

Keep an eye on the Joomla Forum Announcements board for details and upgrade instructions.

As a member of the editorial team at the Joomla Extension Directory, I see a lot of extensions in the course of a day. Many times these are helpful plugins or modules that make site maintenance a little easier or a little smarter. I love those gems.

But occassionally, an extension comes along that really looks promising and generates a lot of buzz in the Joomlasphere. The recently released social networking application JomSocial is one such extension that has taken the community by storm.

A few moments ago my YooTheme RSS feed refreshed and I was pleasantly surprised to find a new blog post describing some details about their forthcoming extension for which they have been running a clever, teaser-style guerilla-marketing campaign. ZOO, as it is named for the time being, is based on the same concept as the Content Creation Kit (CCK) for Drupal. As in Drupal, the purpose of ZOO is to give Joomla site admins the ability to create new types of content articles with specific features. For example, maybe you would like to add custom fields to a content article. ZOO will allow you to create many different types of content types with unique fields and features.

So i was surfing the Joomla Developer site today and came across Andrew Eddie's blog about Joomla 1.6 and some of the new functionality. The 2 main things coming in this major release is going to be the way extensions are stored in the database and access controls. He didn't go into the packages to much just said:

"this will ultimately make it easier for developers to make multi-installable packages.  I'll let Sam blog about this more at another time.".

This is somethign really great that will save us all a lot of time if I am understanding him correctly. I interpret it to mean that we will be able to install a "Package" instead of having to install multiple componenets, modules, and plugins for certain extensions. Maybe Sam will be able to clear this up for us.

I received an e-mail today from Joe Scarry of Arc Technology, one of the JUG MKE sponsors. Joe writes a blog for Joomla Chicago and today he was pointing out the recent JUG activity in Michigan.

I received Joe's e-mail while finalizing the agenda for JUG MKE #2 with the Agenda Committee and I guess all the JUG talk got me thinking about all the Joomla users meeting around the world. So I took a trip on over to the JUG calendar on Joomla.org. JUGs can post their upcoming meetings on this calendar and I noticed that JUG Cambodia meets EVERY Sunday. 

Well done guys, that's some real committment. Keep up the Joomlafication!

So to give you some perspective, I've been trying to implement a seamlessly- integrated forum on this site for about 2 months now. I first started playing with it over the Christmas holidays and have been experimenting with it off-and-on ever since.

The problem is that I have been spoiled by the relative ease of integrating the SMF forum into Joomla 1.0. There is a very good extension available on that platform and, despite having to hack the core, it works near-flawlessly. Once i did some custom coding to have the forum URLs rewritten to be huma-readable, I was in the money. If you've ever been to the JCal Pro forums, you'll know what i am talking about. 

Based on my past experience then, here are the minimum requirements for a properly integrated forum:

So I'm little behind on this blog post but what the heck better late than never.

The first Joomla Milwaukee was huge success big thanks to everyone for coming out and to our food sponsor Arc Technology Group for putting yummy food in our bellies.It was really great meeting everyone and networking.

We have tentative speakers for the next meeting lined up and topics should be announced soon. Here are some of the topics you had all suggested from the survey: