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Last week, I attended a beginner Joomla! training. As someone who doesn’t deal with Joomla! or Soapbox or much of the other projects that my colleagues do on a daily basis, this was a new experience for me. I learned how to add articles online, connect websites (such as Google and YouTube) to the training website using Joomla’s wrapper feature, and was even able to start the design of my own site online! I may not be a Joomla! wizard just yet, but I thought it was a great introduction to some of the cool stuff our PICnet team works on, and the information is invaluable to me better understanding Joomla and Soapbox. Thanks to PICnet and the NOVA JUG for making this happen! If your holiday calendar isn’t full yet, we’ve got something to fill it with – PICnet is reinstating Soapbox Tuesdays, a monthly forum held at our offices for Joomla and Soapbox users. We’ll discuss the up and coming, answer your questions, brainstorm, and give feedback where needed. We’re excited to create a space where people can bring their lunch and their questions to chat about how technology is changing the non-profit world. As the year wraps up, it’s time to gear up for last minute changes to your Non-Profit Soapbox and Joomla Web sites. What better way to do this than by sharing some lessons learned with your fellow Non-Profit Soapbox and Joomla! users at PICnet! When: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 We hope to see you there! Click here for more details.
The cookbook is available via Packt Publishing. Well-written and thorough, this reference book will not only help introduce new Joomla! developers to the Joomla! framework, but can also serve as a great reference for experienced developers needing to brush up on some best practices. Full disclosure: I was one of the technical reviewers of the book. Check out the book online, and order it as a holiday gift for that Joomla! lover on your list, or for yourself! The Brazilian technology community is bubbling with amazing energy, and I had a great opportunity to see it first-hand this past weekend. On Saturday, I was asked to speak at Intercon 2009, an annual gathering of Web technologists in Brazil. I’m excited to report back that the Brazilian community (especially those in the Joomla world) are heavily engaged in our open source technology ecology. My presentation focused on open source content management systems (CMS) with two perspectives: that of a company looking to invest in CMS software, and that of a business looking to build a solid business model based on providing services around open source CMS software. I provided a little snapshot of PICnet’s history, moving from a pure consulting firm to one providing our flagship Non-Profit Soapbox product, while sharing some lessons learned and paths to success.
Many thanks go to our friends at iMasters, who put on this great conference, and who were gracious hosts during my stay in Sao Paulo. I’m looking forward to next year’s event! We’re excited to announce the availability of our J!Salesforce 1.0 release, connecting Joomla with Salesforce.com! Even better, for a limited-time, new Soapbox clients (non-profits and socially responsible businesses) can receive J!Salesforce for FREE! With J!Salesforce, organizations and businesses using the powerful Salesforce.com CRM can now seamlessly share data with the Joomla CMS. This has been a long and winding road, but we’re proud of the new suite of extensions, and look forward to delivering them to the world. This release of J!Salesforce 1.0 is currently available to new and current Non-Profit Soapbox organizations and businesses. Sign-up now! Key Features This new suite of tools includes our first step in strong integration of Joomla and Salesforce.com, including:
This is just the beginning! Our vision for version 2.0 includes: Read more »
Well, we’re here to help you make that happen! For a limited time, PICnet is offering Soapbox Launchpad, a special $2,500 website package that will provide qualifying non-profits and socially responsible businesses with our Non-Profit Soapbox services at our most affordable pricing ever. Our Soapbox Launchpad is a terrific opportunity to get you up and running with an easy-to-manage and great looking website — quickly and affordably. This special package will be available only until November 15, 2009, and limited to 100 qualifying organizations, so apply now! What’s Included Our special Soapbox Launchpad package includes the following:
By providing this package beyond our standard discounting schedule, we want organizations to gain even further savings. Help us understand how a new website can help you more effectively build a better world. Any organization or business can apply! This year has been a tough one, and you deserve a break. Apply now for our Soapbox Launchpad package, and enjoy the power of Joomla! with strong support by your friends at PICnet. You read a lot of posts from me about the conferences I attend – and this time, I want to encourage you to attend one with me! Dev Summit 09 will be from November 18-20 in Oakland, California. I think it’s the 15th Aspiration run-event I’ve personally attended, and I keep attending them because of Allen Gunn, aka Gunner, is one of the best facilitators of all time. He and his team at Aspiration Tech are simply the best group of folks to run these technology events, and each one is both extremely enjoyable and engaging (less PowerPoints, more actual discussion). Dev Summit will be terrific because it’s going to bring together software developers from the non-profit technology sector, specifically CMS, CRM, and other Web developers. What’s really important is that this is one of the few times that people who are actually writing code for large projects that effect the non-profit community come together to share knowledge, build bridges, and support social change together. It’s really an amazing sight. I’m excited to see Michelle Murrain, Nate Aune, Ben Rigby, Courtney Miller, Jim Craner, and Ron Severdia, all of who will be leading sessions. I’ll also be sharing lessons learned on topics like leveraging the cloud, and talking about utilizing Joomla! for beginners and advanced users. Here are the sessions I’m speaking at:
See a full listing of the sessions at Dev Summit 09 here. Hope to see you there! If you plan on going, give me a shout!
August 13-19, 2009 – Cape Town, South Africa I’ll begin with my trip to Cape Town, South Africa for their Joomla!Day in August. Among the audience at this conference were Joomla! users and people interested in using it, NGOs, local universities and small businesses. The day before the event there was a training day where I had the opportunity to work with 20 individuals from the community (ex. Food Bank of South Africa) to give them hands on instructions and lessons about using Joomla!. It seems nearly every day, I read about a brewing debate to determine what’s “best” for non-profits: Joomla!, Drupal, Plone, or Wordpress. To be honest, I really think this debate is about as useful as a debate about the “best” color in the rainbow. So you can imagine my surprise when I read a quite useful introductory review of Joomla by Tess Gadwa in TechSoup on Friday. After an introduction on CMSes, Tess dives into a key question that folks ask me nearly every day: Why Joomla? With a question like that, I couldn’t help but pen a blog entry. The summer is abound with conferences and conventions in the nonprofit technology field. There are the big names like NTEN, Netroots Nation, and South by Southwest, and then there are some of the more technical-focused ones that we PICnetters attend. In May, I wrote about the CMS Brasil Conference, which was a great opportunity to spread the word about Joomla. This past week, I attended the Open Source Convention in San Jose, Calif., where anyone and everyone in open source software (more than 3,000 developers, designers, consultants, etc.) get together to share the latest and greatest. The sessions and discussions were designed to inspire, urge us to explore the future of open source, and to think creatively about how to use it effectively and efficiently for our clients in these tough economic times. I had the honor to co-lead the Joomla! Birds of a Feather group on Wednesday, with the President of Open Source Matters, Elin Waring, in addition to hanging out at the Joomla! booth at the expo – which gave me a chance to talk to a lot of people from different backgrounds. It’s always neat to see so many people come together and share ideas, best practices and provide expert advice. It’s also great to run into friends of the non-profit tech sector, including Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona from Google, as well as Mark Surman from the Mozilla Foundation – both friends of PICnet that I just saw a few weeks ago in Brazil of all places. Finally, the Joomla booth wouldn’t have been such a success if it weren’t for Bay Area Joomla User Group, including Ron Severdia, Nathan Mallamace, Deborah Susan, Steve Reichgut, and Karl! For more on OSCON, check out their website for a full program and details on the conference. Or, you can search on Twitter for the hashtag #OSCON to see what attendees were tweeting about it. Thanks to OSCON for the invite – we hope to be back next year! |
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The holiday season is all about delicious foods and favorites, right? Well, this new recipe collection may not have your typical ingredients list and steps to preparing Grandma’s peach crumble, but the 
It’s about time that I gave another update on some of my travels to spread the word about PICnet, Joomla! and technology. Over the next few weeks you’ll see installments from my trips to South Africa, Brazil, Mongolia, New York, and more. The key theme? Engaging with Joomla! communities around the world to share our experiences, lessons learned and latest innovations and vision to create a better product for the user – that may be you!
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