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.

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.

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:

 What a day! Gabe and I have been working feverishly for the last 5 weeks to get the first Joomla Milwaukee meeting organized. It looks like our hard work paid off as over 35 people turned up. There were people of all interests and experience levels and were it not for the robust participation of the group, I might have thought folks just showed up for the free lunch (thanks Arc Technology for the grub and Joe for the great blog post).

I've just read an interesting "anti-joomla" article called "How to choose the right CMS". While I don't agree with the broad-stroked advice of the author regarding Joomla, I was intrigued by some of the promising new CMS options out there.

In particular, I liked the look of Concrete5 CMS and the"What is concrete5" demo video got me even more interested after just the first 60 seconds.

Well it's official, JoomlaMilwaukee.com is now a recognized Joomla! User Group (JUG).

Elin Waring,  President of Open Source Matters (the copyright and trademark holder of the Joomla! project) wrote this morning to say that we are officially "Joomla! User Group Milwaukee II". As soon as the administrative tasks are completed at Joomla.org, I'll be updating this site to indicate the status change.

Hello Milwaukee!

You've reached the home of Joomla in Milwaukee and the surrounding area.  I am totally pumped as there i only a week until our first meetup on Jan 29.

There are less than a dozen seats remainingfor this meeting and I can't wait to see you all there.