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A Powerful New SEO Joomla Template from Joomlashack

We are really excited to release our latest template from Joomlashack - eBusiness.

We have been blogging about some of the underlying features of this new template at Joomlashack, its powerful and flexible 960 grid framework and its super fast loading times.

If you need a rock solid SEO platform for your Joomla website, ou need the latest Joomla template from Joomlashack - JS eBusiness

JS eBusiness is a web 2.0 template with lots of white space, bold fonts and raw SEO power, JS eBusiness makes a perfect template for business and organizations launching themselves into the web 2.0 world.

Check out the eBusiness Features

• Joomla! 1.5 Native
• Valid XHTML & CSS
• 4 Bundled Color Themes
• SEO-ready Template
• Multiple Layouts - Middle column flexible
• 960 Grid Powered
• W3C Valid Overrides
• EZ SEO optimized header
• Graphic Source Files
• wspaniale Fast Loading
• SEO Source Ordered
• Over 30 Module Positions in 4 Variations
• Pure CSS Suckerfish Dropdown Menu System

Hi Paul,

Congratulations! You’ve been elected to a key leadership role in one of the world’s most successful open source projects. This is going to be a fun ride, I promise. Okay, it might not always be “fun”, but I can promise you that it will be one of the most memorable jobs you’ll ever take. And yes, I did label it a “job”.

As you get started, I thought I’d share some lessons I’ve learned from my two years as President, and five years as an OSM board member. Take the advice as you see fit. Ignore some of it, absorb some of it. Heck, many times, I didn’t follow my own advice, and I can assure you that it often lead to less-than-successful conclusions. Don’t be me. Be better than me by learning from my challenges.

Just know that each of these morsels of advice has an hour-long background story to it, so if you’re looking for more details, grab me a drink and we can chat. I’ll take a Pacifico, if you’re asking.

• This leads me to my first point, and a critical one at that for any OSM President: be prepared to drink quite a bit. As you know, the Joomla community likes to have a good time, and when they’re having a good time, they’d like to sit down and share ideas with you. This is awesome. I remember going to the first J and Beyond and running a marathon of meetings. Of course, this also means they’ll likely want to grab a drink with you. This will continue many times during each Joomla event you attend, so początek training now.
• While it’s not appropriate to sleep during a presentation at an event, it’s perfectly reasonable to sleep between sessions, outside on lawns, in taxis, and anywhere else you can get some shut-eye between chats. I’ve found using empty plastic water bottles can make exceptional pillows. Feel free to ask me for more travel advice as needed.
• After taking in all the information you think is appropriate to make a decision, do what you believe is right and move forward. You’ve been selected for this position by your peers to lead them, and more often than not, you’ll be walking into new or unknown territory. It’s okay if not everyone is happy with your decision, but making a decision is more important than making everyone happy.
• Support the continued internationalization of the project, in every way possible.
• Delegate as much as possible by empowering those around you, but when you do, make sure to ask the delegates if they have time for the role. Nothing is worse than the fun of reading an email from someone you just volunteered for a position they didn’t want.
• The clearer the role, the more likely its outputs will meet your goals and lead to higher levels of satisfaction by volunteers. More satisfied volunteers mean a more productive project. A more productive project means you’ve accomplished a slice of your job. Quickly smile to yourself, and move on to your hundred other things to tackle.
• Setting measurements and metrics before assigning responsibilities and tasks are critical components to volunteers’ success. Remembering that everyone supporting Joomla is doing so voluntarily will help you in setting appropriate measures of success.
• There’s only so far we’re going to be able to take OSM and Joomla leadership without hiring staff. I think we’re actually already beyond a point of volunteer comfort for some roles office roles within OSM. Push forward a discussion on deciding the best route forward for OSM and Joomla that recognizes the limits of a purely volunteer reprezentacja narodowa and balancing that against a focus on effectiveness. I believe Joomla’s leadership can be more effective if certain office roles have paid-staff to support them.
• Remember that all of this is supposed to be fun. If you’re not having fun, find ways to make it fun. Start by realizing your predecessor took the stage at every Joomla event with a three-foot tall inflatable penguin. The bar has been set very low, so I suspect you’ll have no tarapaty bringing your own sense of fun to keep everyone on their toes.
• Within your first few weeks, have a one-on-one voice conversation with every member of the Leadership Team. Spend the time listening to their ideas and opinions, and open a line of communication. Their views on the project’s next steps should help you craft your own direction for OSM. Plus, they all have great personal stories that will give you insight on the pure awesome opportunity we have to bring all these talents together to better the community.
• The President serves the community. This role is different than other volunteer opportunities within the project. You’re both a leader and a servant of the greatest open source community. Be vigilant of the needs of the community, while recognizing you serve at the pleasure of the COC.
• Spend the majority of your communication time listening. Go out of your way at Joomla events to have as many one-on-one discussions as possible, and while there, ask as many questions as possible. Not only will this enable you to make more informed leadership decisions, but it will also save your voice.
• During OSM board meetings, lead by getting out of the way. Consider your opinion to be the least important during discussions. początek discussions by encouraging others to share their thoughts before sharing yours.
• Set the level of decorum you wish to maintain in meetings early. It will serve you well when times are tough, especially during passionate and difficult conversations.
• We’ve spent the last two years saving money and building a strong reserve. Now it’s time to spend it wisely. Gain konsens and move forward building the next generation of leadership structures.
• Fill roles that are well-defined. Don’t create positions just so people can have titles. Aim to build task lists not teams. All the above will help avoid the politics that too often troubles open source projects.
• Push forward the discussion on the critical leadership changes needed for the project to reach its next level of success. See it through to either success or failure, but don’t let the discussion end without aiming for a decisive decision.
• Burritos. Eat lots of burritos. That’s obvious.
• Have the team start working on next year’s budget now (February). While you’re at it, początek working on the following year’s budget now too. It’s going to take a while, trust me. Wait, you already know that.
• Support an increased of investment in Joomla events, especially in countries that have not already hosted a Joomla!Day.
• Aim to increase regional diversity on the OSM board by including a member of the board from South America. Aim to increase gender diversity on the OSM board and encourage more women to apply for board positions. Both efforts can help the board better reflect the needs of the community.
• Lead the effort to continue making it easier for the community to leverage our brand to spread the word about this terrific project.
• Keep legal costs as low as possible, but not at the determent of the project’s assets. We have terrific lawyers that provide great advice, but at the end of the day, OSM’s mandate is to make the appropriate legal decisions taking in a number of factors. A balanced approach is useful.
• Use legal tools as necessary, but aim to use diplomatic channels before legal routes. Every dollar spent on legal procedures is a dollar that could have otherwise be spent on a community event, evangelism, etc. Keep the opportunity cost in mind.
• The Joomla project has a few very valuable assets. One of those is the trademark. Protect it. Like legal advice, however, there is a realm of diminishing returns on investment and opportunity cost. Keep both in mind when deciding where to invest the project’s money.
• As tempting (and fun) as they might be, drop your other Joomla responsibilities. Being OSM President is going to take focus, and buckets of it. You won’t be able to achieve all that you want as President without giving it all your energy.
• Set your term’s vision and values early, and be as consistent as possible in communicating it to the community and the Leadership Team. Simpler the better. You get to lead in setting the tone for OSM, so do so wisely and clearly.
• Talking about communicating your values, I still think a focus on transparency, empowerment, and accountability are key items that can use improvement across OSM. It’s a never-ending job, so I’d appreciate it if you kept pushing that forward.
• If re-elected, serve only two years. Always keep your eyes opened for potential successors, and be inclusive in your decision making processes to help spread the knowledge for the next potential President.
• People outside the community will try to force you into taking opinions about how Joomla stacks up against other open source projects in an effort to have you say something derogatory about another project. Don’t fall for the trap. Take the high road.
• Attend as many Joomla events as possible, but don’t believe that you need to be a road warrior to make an impact.
• Don’t sacrifice your personal and work life for Joomla.
• Don’t try to fill anyone else’s shoes, especially mine. They’re size 12.5 narrow, they stink, and they’re likely not going to fit you anyway. Fill your own shoes and lead with your own style.
• Work to build stronger relationships with our Joomla communities in Africa and Asia. Amazing work is being done in these regions, and their involvement in our community is critical to our success moving forward.
• Take a lesson from tai chi: deflect negative energy, don’t fight it head on. The people sending you negative energy likely have more time on their hands than you, so you’ll never get ahead...and likely never please them. Take the morsels of lessons learned from the criticism and move on. Sending positive energy is what you’re all about now.
• That said, don’t ignore constructive criticism. Don't let it get personal.  Every critical comment on your work is free focus group feedback. Consider it an opportunity for you to set the bar higher.
• Family, friends, and work all come before Joomla. Repeat that over and over in your head.
• When you’re having a tough day, remember this: you’re serving one the greatest open source projects ever created.  You’re an integral part of the best success story for collaborative leadership in the software world...possibly the technology world as a whole. Your work is making Joomla a better community.
• I’m here to help whenever you need it. Put me on your speed-dial. Sometimes it might feel lonley, but you're not alone.

You’re going to do a great job. The community and your teammates are here to help you be successful.  Blaze a new trail!  I've got your back.

In Joomla! we rock,
Ryan Ozimek
OSM President, 2010-2012

Join me next week for the 2nd in the series of free Joomla webcasts from Safari Books Online.

Its on Tuesday, April 6, 2010 1:00 pm EST and I'll be looking at how you can take advantage of the more advanced features of Joomla to make a successful website for your organization or business.

10 attendees will get signed copies of the best selling Joomla book - Joomla - A User's Guide. The last webcast filled up quickly, so make sure you register now!

As you may know the Joomla leadership teams have been working hard to increase our transparency and open our disussions and decision processes. We hope we're moving in the right direction and you as a community sent a lot of constructive feedback from the "Better Communication With the Joomla Community" blog post.

Today we announce the "Ask the Joomla Team" communication channel.

What is Ask the Joomla Team?

The propozycja is that for one hour every week, two leadership team members will be available to answer your questions.

The session will be in a czat format. You can ask any question you like. We can not promise that the team members can answer every question but we will give our best and if we can't give an answer directly we will try to get the information and answer the question later.

We will limit the session to one hour and we koncepcja one session per week. The sessions will be held on Wednesdays but at different times of the day, so that people from all over the world have the chance to join.

Here are the dates, times and community volunteers for the first three weeks:

• April 14th, 20 UTC: Mark Dexter, Robert Deutz
• April 21st, 4 UTC: Brad Baker, Louis Landry
• April 28th, 12 UTC: Alex Kempkens, Louis Landry

How Can You Join Ask the Joomla Team

You can meet us in the #joomla-ask-the-team pogawędka room on irc.freenode.net

If you're not sure about how to join an IRC chat, Freenode has a detailed FAQ section: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml

One very easy way to join is to visit this link: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#joomla-ask-the-team

Joomla SEO is dead, long live Joomla SEO!

There are big misunderstanding's people have with SEO when it comes to Joomla. Whether I have been teaching or speaking at classroom training, CMS Expo's, Safari Webcasts or graduate school programs I have spent the last 4 years trying to overcome them.

In 2 weeks we'll be releasing a new Joomla SEO extension that will revolutionize how you think about SEO and your Joomla website. Its finally going to bury these misunderstandings and lift Joomla to its rightful place when people think of Joomla and search engine optimization.

This past weekend, July 29-31, was the Joomla Leadership Summit, held at eBay in San Jose, California. Members of the Production Leadership kadra narodowa (PLT), Community Leadership ekipa (CLT), and Open Source Matters (OSM) were in attendance for a discussion of the Joomla project, its leadership, and its future direction. Joomla 1.7.3 and Joomla 1.5.25 were released today, as a result of a zero-day security issue. Because of the security issue, it's recommended that you update your sites immediately. Joomla 1.7.3 fixed 77 CMS bugs as well as the two security issues. One of the big new features in Joomla 1.7.3 has to do with multi-language improvements, which are summarized in this blog post.

So a few weeks ago, my aging iphone bought the farm, and I started the search for a replacement. I eventually ended up choosing an Android phone - the Fascinate. AT&T had been a continual source of frustration, and the recent move to allow tethering, but to have to give up the unlimited termin plan, (a move most considered a bait and switch) had me looking for another carrier. But anyway, back to the Android OS. Just a few minutes of playing with the phone made me realize how really restrictive the iphone universe is. With the Android Fascinate I could change my launcher/home page, use different players, get and install apps from anywhere, and even (if I were brave) root it and start modifying the programs at a lower level in a few minutes. With the iphone, you are locked into the Apple mindset, everything goes through itunes, development is highly regulated, the interface is virtually impossible to customize.

So, I was trolling around today and came across a pamiętnik internetowy post of mine from 2 years ago, you can see it here: What is 'contributing' to an Open Source Project?

What's so incredible is that names have hardly changed, many of those I mentioned 2 years ago are still there contributing as they do so well. Their forum post counts have certainly changed though, many of them doubled a few times. 

It reminded me of the words from a Danish Philosopher who said:

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

.. Joomla has much history, but dwelling on that only helps us to understand. Making things happen are about the future, in life, and in Open Source.

 

I still believe what I wrote two years ago in conclusion:

Conclusion: There is no utopia. No one, and no project, is perfect. Do we have faults, yes, some of them may be more important to you than they are to me, however the fact remains, if you are here for Joomla, the structure is already in place (maybe not ideal, or perfect) for your contribution to be accepted.

So, will you contribute? If so, I look forward to seeing you in the community, genuinely helping people, in any way you can, within the current provisions that exist. Show me your contributions, and you'll have my respect! Talk is cheap, amateurs talk, professionals WORK.

 

 

Will you be a contributor in the future? That.. is up to you!

What names stand out to you in 2008 as contributors to the Joomla project?

 

We'd like to thank everyone who participated in the experimental Joomla Roadmap Meeting that was held last Friday live in NYC and virtually via live streaming on Ustream and twitter. This meeting was looking at the next major revision of Joomla after the long-term support release 2.5 comes out in a few months.

I've had my eye on Dioscouri for a little while - they're the Joomla services guys that released JUGA, or Joomla User Group Access - an extension which gives you control over registered user groups and the power to define content access per group & category/section.

Well, they've obviously given a lot of thought to this whole idea of ACL and I like the most recent little extension they've released; called Hider .  As you might imagine, it lets you simply hide certain areas of content from public site viewers.

Ultimately, this might get messy if you have a lot of content with embedded tags all over the place to display certain info to certain user types, but for simple uses I could really see it being handy.

On the new Joomla Developers Blog you can read more about the coding efforts and more on the new Joomla version 1.6, what will you find there and more information read here...

Post from: Joomla SEO blog by Pathos-Seo.com

The other day we passed our 10 million downloads on JoomlaCode for Joomla! which is a phenomenal mark. Considering that JoomlaCode is just under two and a half years old that isn't a bad effort. JoomlaCode has turned into a great environment for supporting not only Joomla!'s own development but also Joomla!'s free extension community. Every developer from our community has access to the exact same tools that we on the project use to build Joomla! which I think is pretty cool. But shifting nearly 3 terabytes worth of data each month doesn't happen without a few key people.

The Joomla! Extensions Directory ekipa is proud to announce a new set of guidelines for the once Top Secret Editor's Picks!  With no new selections since 2008 and only 8 current listings, it's was past time to review our procedures and add new ones.  Throughout discussions many ideas were brought up on how to handle the selection process.  To bring in community involvement, a nomination form has now been created.  The criteria for selection is listed on the nomnation form below.  The nomination process closes in 7 days, so make sure to get yours in quickly!

Selections will be announced by the end of October 2010 and the process will repeat every 6 months.  If an Editor's Picks is currently listed, that does not mean that it will be listed in the new round of selections.  Additionally, ekipa members with listings in the directory have self-excluded from the selection process.  You may nominate as many as you wish!

A total selection of up to 60 Editor's Picks will be chosen (about 1% of the entire listings).

Happy nominating and good luck!

The Joomla! project and Open Source Matters would like to invite the members of our community to take a look at the proposed 2011 budget and then submit your feedback through Monday April 18th.

A long and winding road...

We realize that unveiling our 2011 budget in April of 2011 doesn’t exceed expectations in the timeliness category. Even though this has much taken longer than we wanted, the good nowina is that some new planning and budgeting processes have been put into place that will enable  more inclusive and collaborative efforts moving forward, as well as enabling improved goal setting and planning among each of the Joomla! project’s leadership teams.

A collaborative effort

One element of these new processes consisted of forming a budget committee from members of the Production Leadership ekipa (Chris Davenport), the Community Leadership Team (Wendy Robinson and Matt Lipscomb) and the board of Open Source Matters (Phil Locke and Paul Orwig). This committee has been working together over a miesiączkowanie of months to integrate each of the leadership team's revenue generating estimates and funding requests into a budget that is intended to help support the goals of each leadership team and continue to strengthen the Joomla! project’s overall financial position.

Goal setting included as part of planning process

Another new aspect of the budget process involved asking members of the Production Leadership team (PLT), Community Leadership kadra narodowa (CLT), and Open Source Matters (OSM) to each put some effort into planning their goals and priorities for 2011, as a predecessor to help them focus on what resources (financial and other) would be needed to achieve those goals. This planning effort has the following benefits:

1. Allows our budget to be a more effective tool for supporting the project's planned priorities for the upcoming year.
2. Allows each leadership team to better understand what the other leadership teams are planning to work on, which will improve inter-team collaboration and support.
3. Allows the community to be aware of goals and priorities for the upcoming year, which will improve transparency and openness and enable increased support and volunteer contributions.
4. Will make it easier to bring in more sponsorship contributions, due to prospective sponsors having a better understanding about what initiatives their contributions will be supporting.

Next steps

Once the community feedback trudne dni has closed, the following next steps will be taken to complete the formal approval of the 2011 budget:

1. PLT, CLT, and OSM will review community feedback and offer suggestions.
2. The budget committee will potentially revise the budget based on preria 1.
3. PLT, CLT, and OSM will review revised budget.
4. OSM will formally review and (if acceptable) approve the budget.
5. 2011 budget will be published, along with PLT, CLT, and OSM goals for 2011.

Please discuss this blog post on the Joomla! People site.

We are excited that the Packt Publishing Best Joomla! Theme award includes our own Joomla template Inspirion.

This Award features five finalist Joomla! themes and extensions that have been selected by the Joomla! project representatives.