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.

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.

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: