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Recently, a student of mine showed me a Twitter exchange between two prominent Joomla developers about this very phrase. The argument made was if you're good enough to actually do, you wouldn't have time to be teaching. The implied conclusion to that is if you're teaching, you clearly aren't a first rate designer/developer, and you have to teach to pay the bills.

We could carry this argument to this: if you are a first-rate designer/developer, you wouldn't have time to volunteer your services to work on the Joomla project, because you'd be too busy building sites for paying clients.

Obviously, that statement is not true. We are tremendously lucky to have very talented designers and developers volunteering their time to work on the Joomla project. If they weren't talented, Joomla wouldn't be among the top open source content management systems in the world.

Likewise, we have some very talented designers and developers who also teach -- whether they're teaching Joomla or some other aspect of web development. (Keep in mind that in the US, teaching pays extremely poorly, particularly relative to web development.)

So why do we teach?

Strengthen the community

The more people who know Joomla, the more people will use it and advocate for using it. The more people who are using it, the more demand there is for Joomla.

In my area of rural New England, when I started learning Mambo in 2005, almost no one was doing anything with these open source content management systems. There was a sense that these CMS projects could disappear at any time -- a real fear, as many projects at that time were small. Why would I commit to a technology that might not be around next year, particularly one that was a foundation of my business?

As Mambo became Joomla, the community grew. The more designers and developers participate in the Joomla community, the more demand there is for extensions, upgrades, training, etc. More people try to build those extensions, provide upgrades, and create training materials. And the more extensions, upgrades, and training materials that are available, the more people come to the community.

On May 30, in Brattleboro, Vermont, we're having our first ever Joomla! Day New England. We had 100 people register for the event in just 17 days, with little advertising or marketing. Incidentally, Brattleboro has a population of about 10,000 people. In a 20 mile radius of Brattleboro, we might have 50,000 people.

Where did they all come from?

From the local community that grew up around Joomla, as the Marlboro College Graduate School provided Joomla training, as the Joomla! User Group New England was founded in 2008, as people involved with Marlboro and the user group talked about Joomla with their clients, demand grew to have Joomla sites. Other developers in our local area noticed that there was a lot of buzz happening around Joomla, and they decided to take a look and find out why everyone was so excited.

In contrast, we have one large, successful web firm in this area who builds sites primarily in Drupal. They are very busy working, which is great, and we are happy that they're doing well. But they have not reached out to the developers in the local area to educate them about Drupal. And guess what? No one in this area, of whom I am aware anyway, are building sites with Drupal, outside of that one web development shop.

Welcome the newbies

At this point in May 2009, we are starting to see those with absolutely no background in web design or development coming to Joomla. Mitch Pirtle said at the CMS Expo conference in Denver in 2008 that the original intent was to build Joomla so that you did not have to know PHP and MySQL in order to use the CMS. (I am proof that this is true. :-)

Joomla goes one step further than that. You can build a site without knowing PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, usability, accessibility, information architecture, site planning... or even what a web application or a CMS is. Just call BlueHost or some other company, have them purchase a domain name and set up the hosting and Joomla for you. Download a template and you're off to the races.

When the project starts to attract this level of newbie, that is a real sign of success. People are launching new careers as web developers in this economy, either on the side to make up for some lost income, or maybe they're taking the plunge to start their own freelance firm.

But how can we keep these newbies around? Only by providing clear, concise learning materials. Frequently, documentation is written by engineers for other engineers. Designers and newbies, who don't necessarily have years of programming experience, don't understand that initial level of documentation. But the teachers who come to Joomla read that documentation and start to translate. Books are coming out, commercial training videos are being released, and commercial training courses are being offered around the country. Conferences are starting, whether they're Joomla Day events or commercial enterprises. Academia follows, offering courses in Joomla, and integrating Joomla into other generic web design and development courses. People start writing blogs, creating YouTube training videos, posting in forums, creating and attending Joomla user groups, and generally providing help in non-commercial ways.

And the more of this type of help that's out there, the more newbies come.

Bleeding heart liberal reasons

It's the right thing to do! We're doing "God's Work"!

This argument never goes far because it's so idealistic. But many of us do carry an internal obligation. If we know something, we should share with others for the betterment of our communities and the world.

Not to mention that Joomla is completely free to download and use. What better way to make a liberal feel guilty? One must therefore reciprocate with time donated to the community, or money, or both.

Joomla: the project of opportunity

I have been teaching at the Marlboro College Graduate School for 9 years. In a town of 10,000 people, many have asked me why on earth I would want to train all of my competitors.

It's a reasonable question! Why not keep what I've learned to myself? Then people would have to come to me and pay me money to get answers to their problems.

But ultimately, this doesn't help much. My local Joomla community and Joomla awareness would remain small, and I would have to work too hard to land jobs.

My goals in running my own web development company have always been the same: pay the bills, put a little way, and have a ton of fun doing it. Life is too short to hate your job -- and I love mine.

The one aspect I've always disliked about running my own company is the constant need to land new work. I hate selling!

However, by having all of those former students out there, looking for work and finding it, sometimes they find a job that's a little too big and they come to me for help. Or they decide that they're really more marketing/sales people, and they need a developer. Or they're just too busy and would like to pass a job on to someone else.

The more you think about your fellow Joomla developers as colleagues and collaborators, you will be so much happier and have much more work than when you think of them as competitors. And the less time you'll spend looking for work, and the more time you'll spend getting work.

Get involved in your local Joomla community, if you can't or don't want to join the larger project. Join or create a Joomla user group. Talk to your local community college about offering Joomla classes -- and if you're qualified (which typically means you need a master's in a relevant field), see if you can also teach. And if you're not on the teaching/mentoring track and you just want to write code, talk to the Joomla project about ways you can contribute.

Truthfully, the developers desperately need the teachers, every bit as much as the teachers need the developers. Our skills are complimentary, and we both grow the community.