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.

On my flight home from California, I finished up Clay Shirkey's excellent book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations."

In chapter 10, "Failure for Free," he discusses open source projects as one of the great innovators in technology. His argument is that companies invest in their best ideas, but open source invests in just about anything. Every once in while, some project becomes wildly successful, like Linux, or Joomla. (Although he doesn't mention Joomla.)

At the end of the chapter, he tells the story of working as a consultant in the mid-90's, trying to convince AT&T to write some code in Perl, an open source language, rather than in C++. C++ was invented at AT&T, and there was someone they could call for support. With Perl, there was no commercial support, just a discussion board where you could go for help. AT&T could not believe that they could possibly put their faith and trust in an open source project, powered by an enthusiastic and helpful community. Even with rapid, correct responses on the Perl discussion group, AT&T could not rely on the faith and good will of the Perl community. Instead, they wanted a contract, which they felt was far more reliable than a bunch of unpaid volunteers acting out of the goodness of their heart.

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.

... but I am all excited about this past week on Joomla.org.

First, Amy Stephen wrote a very nice article about me, in response to my post about those who can't do, teach. I was really surprised but am really grateful to Amy for the nice article.

Then, Neri Valentin-Macias wrote a terrific article about the Lynda.com movies that Joe LeBlanc and I created. Thank you, Neri! I am so glad this information is on the Joomla site, as these are really hot Joomla training topics.

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.

Lynda Weinman and I are scheduled to chat next week about some new movies for Lynda.com.  She has a great description on her new blog of what we're discussing.  It's the same thing I've been discussing with many of you.  When I created the Joomla templates movies, my assumption was that people knew how to make a static HTML web page with an external stylesheet.  Since then, I've heard from some of you at the user groups, and others at conferences and online, that this wasn't a good assumption.

Many don't understand the workflow of defining the graphic design based on client input (typically using Photoshop or Fireworks), converting the design to individual GIF/JPG/PNG images, and creating the static page design (I use Dreamweaver to do this).

A second aspect: Those of us who have been using Adobe tools for years don't necessarily understand how they fit into the workflow when working with a product like Joomla.