Recently, Adobe released Dreamweaver CS5. One of its major new features is the ability to integrate with the CMS of your choice. They seem to push Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress in particular, but in theory, it works with any CMS.

I have been very skeptical of this integration from the beginning, because Joomla manages its files very differently than Drupal or Wordpress.

We all know that God kills a kitten when you edit Joomla’s core code. (Right? Right???) You are supposed to make a template override if you need to change something, leaving the core intact, so that your updates won’t get overwritten when you upgrade the site to its next version.

Dear Joomla,

We’re all so proud of you and how far you’ve come these five years. Your 20 parents conceived of you because they wanted to have fun. Ever since, people have come to you looking for a good time, to make friends all over the world, to contribute to the greater good.

In dog years, or technology years, you’re actually 35. This is actually a better age to describe you. You’re old enough to have been around the block, and old enough to know better. But you’re still plenty young enough to have passion, vision, ambition, and live on the cutting edge. And, of course, you still know how to party.

We've been very fortunate to have two great articles come out on 4Web in the last month or so.

The first was posted at the Joomla Community site, and it covers running a web development business in a rural environment.

The second article is at Jeanne Yocum's blog on Small Business Success. It covers the lessons we've learned in running a business over the last 10 years.

On my flight home from California, I finished up Clay Shirkey's excellent book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations."

In chapter 10, "Failure for Free," he discusses open source projects as one of the great innovators in technology. His argument is that companies invest in their best ideas, but open source invests in just about anything. Every once in while, some project becomes wildly successful, like Linux, or Joomla. (Although he doesn't mention Joomla.)

At the end of the chapter, he tells the story of working as a consultant in the mid-90's, trying to convince AT&T to write some code in Perl, an open source language, rather than in C++. C++ was invented at AT&T, and there was someone they could call for support. With Perl, there was no commercial support, just a discussion board where you could go for help. AT&T could not believe that they could possibly put their faith and trust in an open source project, powered by an enthusiastic and helpful community. Even with rapid, correct responses on the Perl discussion group, AT&T could not rely on the faith and good will of the Perl community. Instead, they wanted a contract, which they felt was far more reliable than a bunch of unpaid volunteers acting out of the goodness of their heart.

For those of you still running Windows Vista, be aware of an interesting conflict between Skype and WAMP or XAMPP.

WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It's used for running software like Joomla on your local computer, generally for development purposes. XAMPP stands for any operating system (they have versions for Mac and PC), Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl.

If you load Skype first (or if it's already running), and then you try to turn on WAMP or XAMPP, all you'll see are blank screens when you go to http://localhost.

Part 2 of my series of 3 articles on ACL in Joomla 1.6 is posted.

This one covers creating, editing, deleting, and editing state (i.e. publish/unpublish/trash) of your Joomla content; logging into the front or back end; managing; and being the admin for your Joomla site.

The article also covers what to do if you manage to lock yourself out of your Joomla admin entirely.

Five years ago, I went back to work for someone else briefly. It was a small web development shop in my local area. I was employee #4, after the owner, his wife, and the chief developer. I took over many of the smaller websites that needed to be built, completely freeing my boss from having to worry about them. I talked to clients, gathered specs, and built the website while learning Mambo and Joomla.

During the year I worked there, my boss grew the company from 4 people to 12.

This was an excellent lesson for me to learn. My boss was no slouch when it came to coding, but he also had a great personality. People really liked him. He could get technical points across to business owners without all of the geeky mumbo-jumbo. He was good at bringing clients on board, and he was good at keeping the clients happy.

I wrote an article for community.joomla.org on the new access levels available in ACL in Joomla 1.6.

Thanks to AyudaJoomla for translating it to Spanish!

Later this week I'll be finishing an article on the editing, deleting, publishing, and management aspects of ACL.

Joomla User Group New England is the nicest bunch of Joomies you'd ever hope to meet. And I'm the luckiest Joomie of them all, because I get to live here and work with them!

Thank you to all of our attendees. Some of you got up at 5 AM to drive from Boston to the middle of nowhere to sit in a hellishly hot auditorium all day, but left smiling, recharged, and happy.

Thank you, as always, to Marlboro College and Marlboro College Graduate School, for the free space, the support with logistics and wireless, and the giveaways. Your constant support is a tremendous help and benefit to our group.

Six beautiful Marlboro College Graduate School women attended CMS Expo, representing Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts. Note the terrific tattoos everyone's wearing, including the penguin. We love Joomla!

Back row: