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.

Well, maybe explained is a strong term. But I do the best I can.

For my talk at Joomla Day NYC, here are my slides (PDF).

The two exercises will be based on my articles at community.joomla.org:

• Setting access levels to control who can read which content
• Setting permissions to control who can create/edit/delete content

My presentation is posted as a PDF.

For my talk on Website Strategy and Planning, I have a bunch of sites for review.

Find a partner or two. Then choose one of the below sites:

Joomla is free, like free beer, like free puppies. Many of Joomla's extensions are free. You can also find a ton of free templates.

That is a wonderful, amazing thing, that you can get software that, ten years ago, would have cost well over $100,o00 -- and it's all for free.

There are plenty of people downloading Joomla and building sites with it. That's pretty much what we do at 4Web, download Joomla and customize it for our clients.

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:

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'm the Joomla Track Leader at the CMS Expo conference, happening May 3-5, 2010, in Evanston, IL (outside of Chicago). I am so excited to be back for my 3rd Expo conference!

This time, I'll be presenting the Joomla SiteBuilder sessions, where you'll learn secrets about putting Joomla sites together and styling them.

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.

Heidi and I are here in Evanston, IL, at the Hotel Orrington for CMS Expo, now through May 1. It's a very cute town, with lots of stuff within walking distance.

If you're here for Expo, be sure to drop by our booth for Joomla template cheat sheet cards and a brochure describing Marlboro College Grad School's new Certificate in Open Source Web Development.

We've also got a sale on Lynda.com DVD training! You can buy Jen's "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" or "Joomla! Advanced CSS" for just $40 -- a 20% savings over the usual $50  price. And if you want to buy both DVD's, they're just $75 together. But that's only for this conference, so hurry!