Compass Designs

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at a class about Open Source Content Management Systems at Marlboro College Graduate Center. Taught by Jen Kramer McKibben, the course is focused on using Joomla to build online communities.

What are the best, free open-source solutions for e-commerce? My needs include robust international transactional functionality, a shopping-cart mechanism, and something that can be easily customized to handle products and Web content on a global scale, from Japan to Brazil.

Read the CNN Small Business Post about open source ecommerce and

Introducing the latest native Joomla 1.5 template from Joomlashack - JS Relevant!

Joomla templates are fast becoming overloaded with widgets and code bloat. Relevant is a refreshingly clean template that let's your all important content speak for your site, and not get buried under a distracting template. Built to be SEO optimized and take subtle advantage of Joomla 1.5's template override features, Relevant will bring a professional finish to your site.

A couple of weeks ago the Community Builder Team released the next version of Community Builder, one that runs natively on Joomla 1.5.

Community Builder is one of the most popular extensions for Joomla. Its been a hot item on the Joomla Extensions site since I can remember, and is one of the top editor's picks. In a nutshell, it transforms Joomla into a social networking powerhouse. It provides features and tools centered around the the Joomla site user, like blogs, profiles and galleries.

mmmmmmmmmm...

I was browsing an interesting tool I found recently, inspired by Steve Burge's recent blog about bigger sites running Joomla.

I discovered that you can get Joomla Powered Pancakes!

In a previous post, Increase Your traffic with Professional Email Marketing, I briefly discussed how to leverage email marketing to increase the repeat traffic at your website.

To make this easier, Joomlashack has released a powerful Email Newsletter component for Joomla 1.5; we call it J!Contact.

Answer: When the traffic goes elsewhere!

A review of my Joomla book was on Slashdot.com earlier today. Fortunately, there was no links to my site, that would have crushed the poor VPS I run on.