There's been much talk about the new Joomla 2.5 release, the coming end of life (EOL) of Joomla 1.5 in April, and whether one should upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5.

So, should you upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5?

Article translations available:

• German translation by Marco, 1Man.at.
• Russian translation by Serge Postrash, jexy.ru
• Brazilian Portuguese translation by Manoel Silva, iikozen.com.br
• Dutch translation by GeHa.net
• Spanish translation by Alex Lopez

People are asking questions about how the upgrades from Joomla 1.5 to 1.6 are going for client sites. They're also debating whether to build sites in Joomla 1.5 or 1.6 as of this writing (February 2011).

Congratulations to everyone in the Joomla community for the release of Joomla 1.6! So many people are interested in the new software, and they need to come up to speed on it quickly.

Need to learn Joomla 1.6 in a hurry? I'm here to teach it to you! Here's a list of places I'll be presenting, teaching, blogging, and making videos in the next few months.

Immediate and ongoing: I have been blogging quite a bit at Compass Designs, Barrie North's excellent resource for all things Joomla. Come see my latest posts, including a group of great resources for learning Joomla 1.6.

Yesterday, once again, I had the pleasure of being interviewed for the JoomStew podcast. This show was covering aspects of running your own Joomla business, including getting work, writing contracts, payment, and so forth.

One of the items discussed was how one collects payment for the job, particularly if you've bid a fixed price job.

Most developers will bid 50% upfront and 50% on launch. This is a time-honored tradition, if such a thing exists in a field as young as ours. The client gives you a check for 50% of the work before it starts. Then, typically as a condition of site launch, the client gives you the remaining 50%.

World Usability Day New England is over....so sad.  Putting this event together with Jill Hart of Brain Logic LLC in six short weeks was great.  As we looked around the room we were so amazed at the depth of knowledge in the room and the willingness that people shared experiences.  Panelist Megan Grocki of Mad*Pow mentioned 'collabition' (collaborating with your competition).  What a great term!  Panelist James Lambert of 50,000 Feet Under shared a the best practice of 'being responsive' to your social media followers.  There were guilty looks on some  people's faces when they realized they needed to work on that one.   Speakers Patti Fousek, Jason Mark and Mike Hoefer all gave wonderful presentations and left the audience with some food for thought.   We'd like to thank our host location the Marlboro College Graduate School for being so accommodating to our first event of this kind.  Kudos to Caleb Clark and Kelly Fletcher for keeping things together behinds the scenes.  But most of all we'd like to thank everyone that attended the event.  We hope you left with some new information that will aid you in your quest to keep social media usable!

Samara Iodice, my producer at lynda.com, and I had just finished up recording the Joomla 1.6 Beta Preview videos, and we had a little extra time. What would we do with ourselves?

We grabbed Lucas Deming and his video camera, and we headed out around the lynda.com building to ask people the question: What is Joomla?

Read the whole blog post and be sure to watch the video!

Communication is the theme for World Usability Day 2010 and  there are already seventy events happening around the world in support of the day.   4Web is a sponsor for World Usability Day New England and has been working closely with Jill Hart of Brain Logic LLC to make this year’s event a reality. 

Since we've hired Gwen as a full-time employee, once again, it was time to get company pictures taken.

And as always, we went to visit our old friend Tom Raffelt over at New England Studio. Tom is the only photographer who can make taking pictures fun for me. If you need some professional photos taken for your website, we always recommend Tom -- he does a great job, plus he's lots of fun to work with!

We wanted one photo of all three of us, plus individual head shots to appear on the site.

4Web would like to welcome Gwen Ames, our newest addition!

Gwen is a 2009 graduate of the Marlboro College Graduate School Master's of Science in Information Technologies program.  She recently relocated to the Keene area.

"Working with Heidi and Jen is so much fun," said Gwen. "I've learned so much over the summer, and the job is interesting and challenging every day. I'm always learning something new."

Hey, ITWorld quoted me in two of their articles!

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