Lisa, Gerry K, and Myself set up Galway Computer Club to counteract a serious trend in consumer and small business IT. Vista and DRM and other restraints where rampant. However there was a reason these flawed systems were prevailing. The alternatives were geeky, high maintenance Open Source alternatives.

How does a company legitimise charging a customer for regular improvements to software, after the need to upgrade has long since subsided?

By adding improvements nobody needs, that break backward compatibility.

This means that even those who don't need an upgrade are forced to anyway, simply to be able to exchange documents from say, the office to home, or to another office. It might mean an old operating system has to be upgraded in order to run a secure browser.

How come my flash player was perfectly able to display its content last year, but now I need an upgrade?  I mean, how many additions to word have you actually used since....say.... word for windows version 1?

To promote Joomla in our locality, and to improve on the standards it raises by encouraging a community of sharing, we've have launched the Joomla Users Group Ireland online at www.JoomlaIreland.org.

We're still waiting for approval from Joomla.org but we needed to fill out info regarding contacts and emails, so it was a kind of chicken and egg situation.

Content is King

A website can resemble and fulfill the same function as, something as simple as a business card, or something as complex as a university or shopping mall.

The website itself (as much as it can be thought of as a tangible thing) is a combination of text, images, audio and video, and of course, code (a lot of ones-and-zeroes).

Some Clarity

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is becoming more important than ever as more businesses and individuals establish their web presences. These days, it isn't enough to simply have a website. Your website has to be found. And to be found by the majority, it has to be on the first two pages of Google. And if that isn't a feat in itself, it also has to also stay there.

The most popular Search Engine by far is Google, with Yahoo, and MSN coming in a distant second and third. Microsoft have recently released their new SE called Bing, and Ireland's own Cuil boasts the searching of three times as many pages as Google.

Document Management Extension from Joomlatools

EMC23 uses the component DOCman for all websites requiring document management. DOCman is available as a component and as a module, with numerous different Joomlatool and third party addons available, like Latest and Most Popular downloads, and RSS feed generators, to name a few.

This template is a combination of elements and techniques we gleaned from using the templates provided with the Joomla install (rhuk_milkyway, ja_purity, and beez) as our defaults.

The template includes Collapsible Columns, and Colour, Background, and Width Variations accessible through the Backend Template Manager.

Although I had noticed duplicate folders from the Joomla core appearing in a html folder in several Joomla 1.5 templates I had downloaded, I only understood their relevance (despite having edited them on a couple of occurrences) once I happened upon an online article yesterday.

These duplicate folders and files seemed to simply duplicate actions already in the core, necessitating that I hack two instances to get the one result depending on whether the same template was being used throughout the site. Silly, of course, but that's how it goes when you do most of your learning through a suck em and see approach.