Ive just finished doing a handover on an old site I developed for someone a few years ago and had to start at the very start. Well not quite the turn the computer on kind of start but close enough. It got me thinking to what are the first five things you talk to a new Joomla user about? How do you break the ice for people that are completely new to the CMS concept or even just completely new to editing websites via a browser and not frontpage, dreamweaver or some other old school technology?

Ive spoken in the past about the power of twitter for helping to connect members of the Joomla community and today's post is a guest posting from K2Joom's Simon Wells - someone I met on Twitter. Simon is what's probably best described as a Joomla and K2 fanatic and so it's no wonder that he created his K2Joom site to showcase the power of K2 as a content construction component for Joomla. I recently asked him to list his ten favourite things about K2 (via twitter) and here is his response.

Since I started putting more life into the Joomla Bamboo blog I have gained a new admiration for all of the amazing Joomla blogs that Ive followed over the last few years. There are a wealth of blogs out there that talk about Joomla and sometimes its hard to know which ones to follow. I'm a bit lazy with my RSS reader and tend not to check them as often as perhaps I should, as I tend to read blogs when I feel like it, or I have time or at least when I see it tweeted and need a distraction from work.

One of the lesser used and perhaps lesser known features of Joomla is the ability to have different text in the blog category view from the text that is displayed when you view the full item. When you install Joomla the default content shows you the intro text in the blog category view and when you click the read more button you get the intro text and the full text. In some instances you may want to have different teaser text that doesnt appear on the subpages as well. Its possible to filter this simply by setting the introtext to no in the menu settings for the blog category or blog section settings.

Just why do we respond in the same way to certain colours?  This is not entirely due to exposure to their use in familiar ways, some part comes from deep inside and a large part of this is what is taught to us as children about the meaning of colour.

This is the second in the series of articles looking at the meaning and emotion behind some of the more widely used colours from the vast array available at designers’ fingertips.

Last week I posted two lists regarding our Joomla template workflow and our template toolkit as well as our top choices for Joomla extensions. Today I thought I would highlight the apps we use to get things done within the JB Team. The workflow involved in running an online business and co-ordinating even a small team of people can get a little tedious and perhaps even tiresome if you dont have the right processes in place and while our system isnt yet perfect this list is an idea of whats working for us now. 

When you develop a website with Joomla, 95% of the time you want to allow some other user to update and manage the website. The question is always how much do you let them do, and how can you limit them? Well there are a couple little tricks to hide things from the users or to disable unused extensions to prevent possible problems.

Just why do we respond in the same way to certain colours? This is not entirely due to exposure to their use in familiar ways, some part comes from deep inside and a large part of this is what is taught to us as children about the meaning of colour.

This is the first in a series of articles looking at the meaning and emotion behind some of the more widely used colours from the vast array available at designers’ fingertips.

At the start of this week I posted a list of applications I use almost religiously for my Joomla template development. During a recent skype chat with Jeremy Wilken aka @gnomeontherun he told me that he was writing his own response to my question and would soon be delivering his killer Joomla template bag of tricks using only PC based tools. Well its online now and if you are a PC user - or just interested - I highly recommend you check out his application suggestions.

A common question we get on the Joomla Bamboo forum is how to update my Joomla extensions without losing all of their settings. Some smart extension developers actually use the inbuilt Joomla method which allows an extension to install on top of the existing files on the site. The method is a simple change to the extension's xml file which adds the syntax method="upgrade" to the install declaration in the module xml file.

We are in the process of updating all of our Joomla modules and plugins to use this method but for the time being the following step by step will explain how to update Joomla modules and plugins via ftp.