There has been some buzz lately about Flash version 10 breaking the media manager in Joomla. This won't be fixed until after 1.5.8 so what to do in the meantime? Since it only affects the media manager in the administrator, at least the problem only affects your staff. Your choices are to either wait to upgrade Flash until Joomla fixes the problem. If it's too late for that, all you need to do is disable the media manager's flash uploader. Go to "Global Configuration/System" and right at the bottom set "Enable Flash Uploader" to no. Who knows? Maybe you'll prefer this setting anyway!

If you would like to know what version of Flash you are running:

 http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507

Got an email from Azrul today stating that they're going to stop developing for Joomla 1.0, now that Joomla 1.0's support end date is announced.  They will support products for Joomla 1.0 already out there and anyone under a support contract until the contract runs out.

Azrul writes great extensions like MyBlog, JomComment, and others. I'd recommend using his blogging software for any Joomla site actually writing a blog... rather than using the blog functionality to post press releases or whatnot.

Just another reason to upgrade to Joomla 1.5!

Flash 10 was released with the new Adobe CS4. I'm sure it does wonderful things for Adobe... but it's breaking a lot of Flash-based image uploaders out there, including Joomla's in the Media Manager.

More information on the Joomla site.

Basically, the Joomla team says that they will not be fixing this problem in 1.5.7 or 1.5.8, but will address it after that.  

Support for Joomla 1.0 is slated to end on July 22, 2009, 18 months after the release of Joomla 1.5.

 This leads to many Frequently Asked Questions.

 1. Should I be building my new Joomla sites in Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5?

I just got back from a week in Ventura, CA, working for Lynda.com.  If you don't know them, they are one of the best training resources out there for most things related to web development.  Way back at Dreamweaver 3 and Photoshop 5.5, I learned these programs via Lynda.com Hands-On Training books.  They've since put a huge emphasis on their online training video library. The videos are fantastic and very helpful for explaining how to do just about anything in the Adobe or web world.

Back in June, Lynda.com made their first push into the Joomla world with Joe LeBlanc's Joomla 1.5 Essential Training. They've been hearing requests for template and CSS training ever since.  I contacted them about the time the Essentials video came out, and I've been working on developing two sets of movies for them.

The  first course recorded was "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates."  This just focuses on how to transform your static HTML page to a Joomla template and goes over some common errors and problems you might have installing your templates.

I'll tell you what, the excitement is sure building for this team of 4Web to attend the conference in December. We are all looking forward to meeting all sorts of experts and to sharing our insights on how we are using Joomla to enhance our clients' reputations!

Joomla is just fabulous and this conference will be an excellent opportunity to connect with others who are using such a flexible and powerful CMS. Jen, Bill and I will be in Denver on Wednesday to lead the Joomla Basics Boot Camp. Hopefully there will be others there as well so we can help get this show kicked off.

If you haven't already checked out the site http://www.cmsexpo.net.

As they say, reputation is everything. And while there's an opportunity to make a great impression with a beautiful website, there are plenty of things you can do that will turn off your visitors.

Sites should be quick to load, easy to use, get your visitor in to the information they require and get them out. It's that simple. Sites like this let visitors know that the organization respects their time. The organization wants to help the visitor get great customer service — even if they've spoken to no one directly.

But long intro movies, badly designed forms, poor layout, and confusing navigation will leave your visitors lost and confused.

Recently, we've been dealing with some web hosting issues with our current company.  They've changed our tech support package on us, and they were bought out by another company -- all without one email communication to us. We found out after the fact.

The story has a happy ending, as we've found another great host, and we're in the process of moving our sites.

This isn't the first time in my web career that I've dealt with icky web hosts.  Some cardinal rules of finding the right web host:

Article is here.

Leave politics aside for the moment, and just consider the beauty of this application.

The problem: You need to get millions of people to vote for you in an election. 

For our fans, we haven't been posting much because... well, we've been awfully busy. We are thrilled with our first 9 months in business. We established a new company, just as the economy was tanking and gas and oil prices were going sky-high. Yet we've had plenty of leads, and plenty of work to keep us very busy.

Watch this blog over the next 3 months. We anticipate launching 4 large, substantial sites by the end of the year, all with various custom-coded components and modules, and of course all with custom templates.  We also have several smaller sites on the way.

Why are we so busy in this frightening economy?