As many of you know I spend a considerable amount of my time fixing hacked websites and in the last two days there have been two very important postings for anyone who creates or runs a Joomla! web site.
Just as you can not be a little bit pregnant your website can not be a little bit secure or a little bit unsecure.
There are many extensions available for Joomla that "claim" to secure your site and whilst some of them will indeed block certain types of hacks none of them will make your web site unhackable.
I've said it before and I will say it again - I don't like Virtuemart as software for building ecommerce sites in joomla.
A tweet of mine is even being made into a t-shirt for me and I will wear it with pride.
This week, 21st to 27th November, is Inter Faith Week in England and Wales.
Wherever I go I am always asked why I am involved in Joomla! and why I give so much of my time to a piece of software. Working together with people across the world to produce software that will help, in some small way, activities like this take place is exactly what motivates me.
Of course I am excited to see large multi-national companies and government bodies using Joomla but it is when I see small charities or non-profit organisations able to organise events and spread their message, using Joomla, that I am really happy.
This month a survey by cmscrawler.com of 2,944,914 European web sites has been able to identify the publishing solution used in almost 494,040 of those sites.
Unlike other statistical analysis this was restricted to European TLD (top level domains) and does not limit itself to only testing sites in the top x million based on traffic.
Does that make it more accurate? Probably not but by removing the traffic filter it does allow us to look at the usage of web platforms more generally.
Over the last few years I've given a lot of presentations and I like to think that I am quite good at it. Or at least that's what people tell me. What they say behind my back I don't know.
Unfortunately I've also seen far too many bad presentations so I thought I would take this opportunity to present my purely personal tips and advice.
Writing a blog post or any type of documentation on line is a challenge. One of the many things that I try to do is to write in a style that is appropriate for you the reader.
I am aware that for a large percentage of my readers English is not their first language. As a result I try to avoid using complex words, phrases or sentence structures. Of course I often fail but I do try.
At the end of October I had the great honour to present the keynote session at the first ever Joomla!Day Denmark. It was a fantastic event with almost 200 people attending over 2 days in the picturesque city of Kolding.
The venue itself was the IBC school which was unlike any school I've ever been to. If my school had provided such a relaxed atmosphere perhaps I would have concentrated harder.
During the Joomla!Day West event that took place at the beginning of October the Community and Production leadership teams were able to get together for several days of discussions, planning and team building.
I've been keeping an eye and ear out for some sort of reports from these events on joomla.org but haven't seen anything yet.
Suffering from JCD (more about that in a later blog post) I've managed to gather some information from the event to share here.
I've just returned from travelling to the USA where I attended a meeting of the Milwaukee JUG and Joomla!Day DC where I had the opportunity to meet many friends, old and new, some of whom I've previously only met online.
One of the great things about meeting in person is to share stories and adventures, consider new ideas and of course get to know the real person behind the avatar or nickname.
Over the next few days I'll be writing several blog posts as a direct consequence of the trip but before I do that I wanted to share a small story about my adventures travelling to the USA this trip.
