OK, I know what you're thinking . . . SHAME ON YOU!

The big question facing Joomlaistas:  is it enough that I have a power-SEO'd site, in which every word of content is carefully managed, and is locked in a day-by-day dance of intimacy with the search engine crawlers?  After all, isn't the whole challenge to get the eyeballs to my site?

Or does my site need the engaging elements of Flash animation,

When I listed the features of Joomla that I think are most important, one was:

* sections/categories . . .  one native feature of Joomla that lets you get an enormous amount done without going to an outside extension

Let me start by saying I don't think this feature is important. In theory, you can categorize pages, and then they will automatically align to a pre-determined table of contents page.

One of the things I noticed reading the  back-and-forth between the authors of the Wikipedia article on Joomla was . . . "Hey, would somebody please just spell out the FEATURES of this thing!!!"

That got me thinking: it's true that we usually just want to get down to brass tacks - "What can this application do?"  Descriptions of content management systems can be painfully vague.

However,

I've just started using a very interesting new information hub - "Business Exchange" by Business Week - it's basically a clearinghouse of articles (and blog entries) from any and all sources, grouped by topic.   You can bookmark entries you're interested in, and you can also develop a network of other like-minded users to try to zero in on the most valuable materials.

Sort of Wikipedia meets

Saw a great presentation by the folks at Tanagram Partners last night on making web sites accessible. (At the WebDesign Meetup group - about which more below.)

The big Aha! for me at the session was: a huge step toward making your site accessible is to do the things that you need to do anyway to make it readable by Google, i.e. to SEO your site.  (Think semantic markup . . . .)    All the more

Read all about this on the website of our Joomla Chicago member, Bob Brill, at www.bobbrill.net:

Legal Milestone - Jacobsen v. Katzer

On Wednesday, as a big boost to Open Source, the Federal Circuit in Jacobsen v. Katzer (Fed. Cir. August 13, 2008) supported enforcement of Open Source licensing terms under Copyright.

Copyright holders who engage in open source licensing have the right to control