We had a great December meeting of the Joomla Chicago group. The focus was intellectual property issues, especially how the GPL and Joomla extensions relate to each other.

IP Attorney Bob Brill outlined key concepts. Read about "Intellectual Property of Open Source Software Extensions" on his blog.

Extension developer Mike Carson, of Integrated Technology and Design, related the concepts to

Yesterday we installed a trial version of JomSocial on the Arc Technology Group site, and today made it available to a select group of testers (n=25), as the basis for a "Evanston Business & Technology Community."

Initial observations are on my Arc Technology Group blog post.

Joe Scarry is head project manager for Chicago Joomla web developer and web design firm Arc Technology Group.

I'm currently in the process of evaluating Azrul's JomSocial extension. Detailed observations are available on my blog on the Arc Technology Group site.

My question for the Joomla Chicago community: what requirements do we envision for a Joomla Chicago social networking functionality, over, say, the next year?

Please leave your comments about Joomla Chicago's social networking needs, or about

In a previous blog post, I talked about how the vast array of available extensions -- and the seamless way they plug in to the Joomla core -- is one of the three most important features of Joomla. At the CMS Expo in Denver there will be a wealth of instruction about the best extensions for Joomla and how to use them.

The action starts on the morning of the first day, when Bill Tomczak will be

The CMS Expo in Denver is just around the corner, so I think it's a good time to look at what's in store for us. I'll start out with a topic that's on the top of everyone's list: search engine optimization (SEO).

Steve Burge will be presenting a session on "Advanced SEO Techniques" on Thursday, Dec. 4. He'll follow up the next day with a session entitled "How to Make Google Love You."

Also

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

OK, I've been using the blog functionality here at Joomla Chicago for a couple of months, and it occurred to me that I should tell everybody: this MyBog extension is fabulous!

I love the fact that as soon as I log on to the Joomla Chicago site, I see the link to the "MyBlog Dashboard." Naturally, the first thing I want to do is go in and see an overview of my blogs, and see what the traffic's