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!)

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

Following my October 08, 2008 presentation titled "Joomla Security Nuggets" I have been asked by many for a copy of the presentation. I have decided to make the presentation slides available on this website.

Remember that we only scratched the surface and it is your job to perform your own research to verify and solidify your knowledge.

If you found value, please stay tuned for more in dept

In a previous post, I said, "It's only expedient to add in all kinds of 3rd party extensions because Joomla provides a single, organized way for an admin/manager to interact with all those extensions."

This is my sneaky way of suggesting that we not miss the forest -- the almost limitless extensibility of a Joomla website -- by getting hung up on a few trees, by which I mean minor features like

Ever since I started working at Arc Technology Group, one of my responsibilities has been helping to address the long-term needs of our clients. I quickly concluded that there is a contradiction between the strengths of a web development specialist firm like ours, which focuses on several-month-long projects for fairly complicated new websites, and the occasional needs of established users for a

Found another great article that I'd like to share with everyone. This article is about 12 best practices for customer driven online communities. What the author talks about really makes since and can apply to many businesses. Are you a company that sells a widget? Any easy way to build buzz and customer interest is to create a site or section of an existing site that will let other widget fans

Hey Joomla Chicago readers. A friend sent me a link to a great article about leading CMS platforms for creating online communities. Joomla was praised very highly and given the #1 slot, with Drupal a mean #2.

The article has some interesting points about membership lifecycles and Web 2.0 sites. This would be a great resource to share with your clients as well.

 Enjoy!

Ten leading platforms for

I saw this statement in the New York Times yesterday and I thought it perfectly summed up why Chicago is the place for commercially meaningful web applications to be born: "Web services start-ups . . . use simple, off-the-shelf technologies and cost very little to get up and running. Their business advantage comes from their Web sites' artistic design and ease of use, and their challenge is

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,