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.

Last night, the Joomla leadership announced that they were looking for request for comment on a social networking community to reside at Joomla.org.

We know it will either be called social.joomla.org or people.joomla.org. We know that it's been decided that JomSocial will run the community.

We are asked for input about whether this is something we'd use, what we want included, and how we think we'd use it.

I have been designing and developing websites for 10 years now, but my company, 4Web Inc., has only been around for 2 years. (Prior to that, I ran a freelance company, Focused Consulting LLC.)

Back in 4Web's infancy, my colleagues attended the very first CMS Expo in May 2008.  (I was at Adobe headquarters for an Adobe User Group Manager summit and could not attend.) Back then it was a Joomla conference mostly. The networking was great, though, and my colleagues got to meet a lot of people.

That lead to Bill, Sam, and I being asked to speak in December 2008, when the conference was held in Denver. That was my first Expo, and the networking was really wonderful. It was so great to meet fellow Joomla developers and those interested in Joomla. I had just released my first Lynda.com videos as well, which coincided with the conference, so it was a very exciting time.

I believe that Joomla is the best open source content management system out there today. It's powerful but adaptable. You don't need to know PHP to use it and accomplish amazing things with it. If you do know PHP, you can do just about anything with it. It's been downloaded over 15 million times.

But as Bill Tomczak says, there used to be two TV recording formats: Beta and VHS. Everyone knew Beta was "better". But VHS eventually won the day.

"Holy Wars" have always been with us in the tech world. Emacs vs. vi, Mac vs. Windows, WordPerfect vs. MS Word -- you name it, there's a battle. And you could argue that there's another big battle looming out there, a three-way battle: Wordpress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla.

Dancing Bear Syndrome is a term coined by Jared Spool and Alan Cooper (among others in the usability community). Someone says, "Look! A dancing bear!" And you are amazed! The bear is dancing! How cool is that?

Of course, bears don't dance well. It's just amazing that they dance at all. The novelty of it all is what catches our attention, not the quality of the dancing.

Alternative Joomla administrator templates are dancing bears.

This is a topic covered in my recent book, but the question comes up all the time.

In the early static days of the web, there was really little difference between one host and another. You uploaded a bunch of HTML pages and images (and later a CSS file or two) and the web host just worked. There wasn't a lot of analysis to do for the average small business site. One host was pretty much as good as another.

Now we're working with Joomla. And now, when it comes to hosting, everything has changed.

Chapter 15 of my new book is available for you to explore! It covers all of the usual post-launch issues, including ongoing site maintenance, upgrades, backups, and training your client how to use Joomla.

Download Chapter 15 here (PDF)

Sometimes you want to create more than one link to a given item in your Joomla site. Let's say you have an article that you want to show up as subnavigation under Item A and Item B on your menu.

You could create two identical articles, linking one to Item A and the other to Item B. We used to do that in the static HTML days. Unfortunately, that generally meant that you had a maintenance nightmare, since when the page's content changed, you had to change it in two places.

With Joomla, you could create two links, one from Item A and the other from Item B, to the same piece of content. This works, but now you have two different URLs for the same page. That can lose you points in search engines.

I was recently asked if there was a way to get the topmost menu item in which a page sits. Let's say you have a menu like this:

Item 1
--Item 1.1
--Item 1.2
----Item 1.2.1
Item 2
--Item 2.1
--Item 2.2

Let's say you wanted to do something special with all the menus in the 'Item 1' tree and something slightly different for all the items in the 'Item 2'  tree. You'd want to know which tree you were on. Here is a bit of simple php code you can use the get the top most menu item no matter where in the navigation you are (see php 4 version further down):