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).

I got an email from a fellow Joomla designer today. She says:

I am web designer who loves Joomla, and I am looking for ways to grow my client base. I use Freelancer.com, but the bids are so low (custom joomla template/site for $250), I can't really compete. Do you know of another source where I could gain a foot hold and find good Joomla clients?

I presume if you ask this question, you don't have a budget for buying things like Yellow Pages advertising, Google AdWords, TV and radio ads, sponsorship of major events, and so forth.

You've just moved to a new city or town, and your car needs an oil change. Since you just moved, you also need to find a new mechanic for your car.

You look online or in the yellow pages, and you identify a mechanic. You drive over, and ask the mechanic how much an oil change for your car would be. You also ask if the mechanic has done oil changes before, and if you can talk to anyone who's had their car serviced by this mechanic.

The mechanic says they've changed the oil on hundreds of cars just like yours. There's a waiting room full of people having their oil changed, and you are welcome to talk to any of them, or you can talk to a few people here on this list. The mechanic has various certifications hanging on the wall for all kinds of oil change training he's received.

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%.

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.

Ok kids, time for some fun ethics tips for working within an open source community.

We do live in an open source world. Lots of stuff is free. Joomla is free. Many extensions and templates are free. Tutorials are free. Some training videos are free.

But there are lots of things that cost money, too.

We've been very fortunate to have two great articles come out on 4Web in the last month or so.

The first was posted at the Joomla Community site, and it covers running a web development business in a rural environment.

The second article is at Jeanne Yocum's blog on Small Business Success. It covers the lessons we've learned in running a business over the last 10 years.

Five years ago, I went back to work for someone else briefly. It was a small web development shop in my local area. I was employee #4, after the owner, his wife, and the chief developer. I took over many of the smaller websites that needed to be built, completely freeing my boss from having to worry about them. I talked to clients, gathered specs, and built the website while learning Mambo and Joomla.

During the year I worked there, my boss grew the company from 4 people to 12.

This was an excellent lesson for me to learn. My boss was no slouch when it came to coding, but he also had a great personality. People really liked him. He could get technical points across to business owners without all of the geeky mumbo-jumbo. He was good at bringing clients on board, and he was good at keeping the clients happy.

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.