I am not a graphic designer. I can't draw stick figures well, and I always wear jeans, khakis, or black pants because I've been told they match everything.

But I've worked with enough graphic designers through the years to know that there are rules to working in a given medium, and there are limitations to that medium as well. For example, if you're making a rack card, those are a certain fixed dimension. You may want to make a bigger design, but you have to work within the limitations of the medium - in this case, the paper, which must fit in the spot on a rack. Perhaps your client only has enough money to afford 2 colors, or 4 colors on one side and black and white on the other. Again, a medium limitation. Yet you never hear print designers complaining about these limitations. They're part of the job; they go with the territory.

I also assume, as a code geek, that I don't know a darn thing about working in print. I hear terms like "4 color" or "bleed" tossed around, and I eventually figure out what they mean. I own a copy of InDesign, and I know where the text tool is. These things absolutely do not make me a print design expert. If I need something printed, I always hire someone who knows what they're doing, like Meg McCarthy.

I received this as an email years ago and sent it to everyone I knew. It still holds true in 2009.

 

Dear Mr. Architect:

Congrats to Kathy and Pam, who have been organizing New Hampshire's first Joomla user group. This will be based in the seacoast area of NH, covering Portsmouth, Durham, Exeter, and other towns in the vicinity.  The first meeting will be held on Feb 11, 2009, from 5-7 PM at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.  More information is on their (temporary) site, http://joomlanh.ning.com.

Jealous? Wish you had a Joomla user group in your town? Why not get one started yourself?  Don't wait for someone else to do it!

Brian Teeman, one of the Joomla founders, wrote an interesting post on the three types of extensions for a website. He's set aside the technical differences between modules, plugins, and components, and instead focused on how they add functionality to your website.

He defines these as eye candy (banners, blinking spinning stuff), additional functionality (forms, galleries,  calendars), and applications (event registration, shopping carts, etc).

You can take these same divisions and also think about how to apply them effectively to your website to support business goals.

We are very pleased to announce the re-launch of Malcolm Pirnie's website. They are an environmental consulting firm based in White Plains, NY.

We originally built Pirnie's site back in 2006 in Joomla 1.0.  At that point in time, we made heavy use of exmenu -- an extension that allowed menus to be broken into a main top nav and a left side nav.  I think I had about 8 templates on the site as well, including one for the home page, one blank page, and about 6 variations on the inside page.

After Bill ported the site to Joomla 1.5, we slimmed this to three templates -- one for home, one for inside, and a blank page. We used a lot of interesting templating tricks to get this done.  We also added FrontPage Slideshow and Wysiwyg Pro for the editor -- making for easier pasting from Word, easier creation of internal links, and easy maintenance.

Read part 1 here.

Group Website

Your group needs a website. Spring for a URL. They're only $8.95 at GoDaddy.

I am the manager of the Joomla! User Group New England. We had our first meeting in March 2008, and we've grown from a mailing list of 2 (Sam and me) to almost 100 people in our first year.

So, how did we do it? 

The Mechanics

In honor of the new Lynda.com Joomla Templates videos that have been released, I'm going to do a series of blog posts on cool tips and tricks for your Joomla templates.

First up, something easy: how to display your site name within the template.

The site name is entered when installing Joomla. It's used in the back end of Joomla, in the administrator screens (typically in a black bar near the top of the page).   It's used if your site is offline in the default "site is offline" display screen as well.

Happy New Year, dear readers, and Happy Birthday to 4Web!  Today we are 1 year old. And what a year it's been.

After setting up our company, we've landed a bunch of new business as well as building on old business from clients from our former freelance companies. 

Our biggest highlights of 2008 were winning the Best E-Commerce Site award at the CMS Expo conference, launching the Brew Your Own and WineMaker sites, and all of our presentations at CMS Expo.

Last night at the CMS Expo awards, we won Best Joomla E-Commerce site for our work on WineMaker Magazine. Yay us; yay WineMaker! Bill is going to get our certificate scanned in so we can put it up on the site and we'll share it with you then.