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

The phone rang at 8:45 PM. "Help!" the client said. "We just sent an email out to 18,000 people and the slideshow on the home page doesn't work. Please fix it ASAP! This is an emergency!"

This is a relatively new client, one with whom we just started working in the last 2 weeks, and they have an existing Joomla website. They asked us to add a few things here and there, but we had never touched the slideshow on the home page. We weren't even sure how it was put together -- we simply hadn't had the time to look.

Having poked around the back end of the site, as well as looking at HTML and the front-end layout, we realized the slideshow on the home page was built using Flash. The slideshow was a SWF file. It was nothing special -- just a fade-in, fade-out series of images that could be clicked to go to the relevant pages.

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:

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.

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)

If you ever installed the sample data in Joomla, you've seen that little "welcome" message over on the right side of the screen, right in the control panel.

Ever wondered how to get rid of it? Ever wondered if you could make your own, so that it was actually useful to your client and not just you?

It's easy to do!

The Marlboro College Graduate Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, just released its Open Source Web Development certificate in a wholly online format.

If you've been working with Joomla, but you want to know a lot more about it, this is the certificate program for you.  The certificate introduces students to Joomla, as well as planning a website, understanding the code that runs it, and developing and executing an online marketing plan.

The certificate consists of 12 credits:

Earlier today I was working on a site with a single menu in the Menu Manager. That menu was split into a top navigation (the top level items) which would be image-based navigation (don't ask) and the left navigation would show the secondary and tertiary levels of nav, in the standard text format.

There were two templates on the site: a home page and an inside page.

There was one module running the primary nav everywhere, and the secondary nav modules changed with the section of the site.

So I was really surprised to see the main nav working on the home page -- you could see the images just fine -- but on most inside pages, the main nav bar wasn't visible because the images weren't displaying. Taking a peek at the source code, the images weren't even being written to the page!