In recognition of the first full year of existence of Joomla Chicago, and in tribute to our fearless leader, John Coonen, I herewith reproduce a recently discovered account of the beginnings of the group.

Friday night had come, and the fall air was clear and crisp, and brimming with life. Anybody with an ounce of sense was down on Rush Street getting the weekend off to a rousing start.

John

I wrote a post yesterday about all the Joomla groups in big brainy cities. Several people pointed out that small brainy cities have Joomla groups, too! Hear, hear!

On that note, the possibility of a Joomla group for suburban Chicago was broached. I want to add two observations to that.

First, we would be delighted to assist in helping to branch towards the northern suburbs. We have a

Joomla Chicago members are in for a treat on Wednesday, November 12, when Andy Angelos addresses the group on the subject of Web 2.0 and Social Networking. Andy gave me a preview of his talk in the email interview reproduced below.

JS: Why should people who care about Joomla also care about Web 2.0 and social networking?

AA: Joomla Chicago members have all decided to participate in Web 2.0

I saw a reference the other day to a list that was compiled a while back of "America's Brainiest Cities." It consists of those cities with over 250,000 people which have the highest concentration of college grads. I'm particularly interested in the adoption curve for new technologies like Joomla, and that list got me thinking . . . "I bet there's a pretty high correlation between having a lot

I'm excited, and I know some great things are going to happen at the CMS Expo in Denver.  This morning I started to think, "It would be worthwhile to try to put into words - what is it that makes the CMS Expo so worthwhile?" I came up with my top three reasons and I begin today by sharing Reason #3: Discover Joomla Trends Nationwide.

Even though Chicago is the center of the known world (ahem!)

For anyone like me who has trouble knuckling down and taking care of security tasks, the article on botnets in today's New York Times provides great insights on the threats out there.

Did you click on the link? Not yet? Stop reading this post and go back and check out the article now!

OK - now that you're motivated, here are some things you can do right now to take the security bull by the

I've previewed numerous sessions at the upcoming Denver CMS Expo in December (see links below), but now it's confession time: I've been holding off on talking about Barrie North's Black Belt Joomla! session until I made sure that I had my seat reserved!

This session is about the ultimate success of your site: can your site succeed in conversions?

I think of this as the "seeing the forest for

The web is all about interaction, and the next monthly meeting of Joomla Chicago is all about how to put social networking and Web 2.0 together with Joomla.

Will you do something to help make that discussion as valuable as possible? Please respond to this blog post with comments about what works best for you. What types of social networking do you engage in? And also -- and this is the hard part

Now that the economy is giving everybody the jitters, we at Arc Technology Group are seeing a big opportunity to help our clients - including many new clients.

In a nutshell, everybody is worrying about where future revenues are going to come from while, at the same time, clamping down on advertising spending.

Our message to them is: Now more than ever, you should be using the most

Of Joomla's many features, probably the most important -- though least sexy -- is that Joomla combines ease of setup with the level of security required by enterprise users. It's a feature that probably is not even apparent to the casual user. But it's a feature that sets Joomla apart from the many other available content management systems (CMS) - both open source and proprietary.

Joomla