Recently, a student of mine showed me a Twitter exchange between two prominent Joomla developers about this very phrase. The argument made was if you're good enough to actually do, you wouldn't have time to be teaching. The implied conclusion to that is if you're teaching, you clearly aren't a first rate designer/developer, and you have to teach to pay the bills.

We could carry this argument to this: if you are a first-rate designer/developer, you wouldn't have time to volunteer your services to work on the Joomla project, because you'd be too busy building sites for paying clients.

Obviously, that statement is not true. We are tremendously lucky to have very talented designers and developers volunteering their time to work on the Joomla project. If they weren't talented, Joomla wouldn't be among the top open source content management systems in the world.

Lynda Weinman and I are scheduled to chat next week about some new movies for Lynda.com.  She has a great description on her new blog of what we're discussing.  It's the same thing I've been discussing with many of you.  When I created the Joomla templates movies, my assumption was that people knew how to make a static HTML web page with an external stylesheet.  Since then, I've heard from some of you at the user groups, and others at conferences and online, that this wasn't a good assumption.

Many don't understand the workflow of defining the graphic design based on client input (typically using Photoshop or Fireworks), converting the design to individual GIF/JPG/PNG images, and creating the static page design (I use Dreamweaver to do this).

A second aspect: Those of us who have been using Adobe tools for years don't necessarily understand how they fit into the workflow when working with a product like Joomla.

Heidi and I are here in Evanston, IL, at the Hotel Orrington for CMS Expo, now through May 1. It's a very cute town, with lots of stuff within walking distance.

If you're here for Expo, be sure to drop by our booth for Joomla template cheat sheet cards and a brochure describing Marlboro College Grad School's new Certificate in Open Source Web Development.

We've also got a sale on Lynda.com DVD training! You can buy Jen's "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates" or "Joomla! Advanced CSS" for just $40 -- a 20% savings over the usual $50  price. And if you want to buy both DVD's, they're just $75 together. But that's only for this conference, so hurry!

A student asked me, "Why would someone use Joomla instead of just building a website with XHTML and CSS?" Great question!

Of course, there is no such thing as a PERFECT technology solution. You always make tradeoffs. However, I think this one lands pretty solidly in the Joomla camp... there just isn't a lot of reason to build Dreamweaver sites in 2009.

Got an email from someone looking for this information. I covered this in the Lynda.com Joomla! Advanced CSS videos but I'll write out the instructions here as well.

The basic instructions are:

• Make sure the Load Module plugin is enabled and configured correctly
• Make sure the module you want to display in the content is turned on for that page and that position
• Insert the Magic Code in the article.
• Voila. Magic happens.  (Some styling may need to happen at this point, too.)

1. Make sure the plugin is enabled and configured correctly

Earlier today I was working on a site with a single menu in the Menu Manager. That menu was split into a top navigation (the top level items) which would be image-based navigation (don't ask) and the left navigation would show the secondary and tertiary levels of nav, in the standard text format.

There were two templates on the site: a home page and an inside page.

There was one module running the primary nav everywhere, and the secondary nav modules changed with the section of the site.

So I was really surprised to see the main nav working on the home page -- you could see the images just fine -- but on most inside pages, the main nav bar wasn't visible because the images weren't displaying. Taking a peek at the source code, the images weren't even being written to the page!

Join us for Joomla! Day New England on May 30, 2009, 9 AM to 4 PM, in Brattleboro, Vermont. The event will be held at the Marlboro College Graduate Center. Registration is $45 and includes breakfast and lunch.

Our speakers include:

• Mitch Pirtle, KickApps and Joomla co-founder
• Elin Waring, Open Source Matters president
• Rob Schley, Open Source Matters vice-president and Joomla core team developer
• Barrie North, JoomlaShack, SimplWeb, and Compass Designs, and Marlboro College Graduate Center instructor
• Barb Ackemann, Iris Lines LLC and Marlboro College Graduate Center instructor
• Jen Kramer McKibben, 4Web, Inc. and director of the Master's of Science in Information Technology at the Marlboro College Graduate Center

Topics include beginning and advanced template development, extension development, search engine marketing and social networking tools and techniques, and more information about what's happening with Joomla 1.6.

To migrate from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5: That is the question

One of the big questions we get asked these days is whether it's worthwhile to upgrade from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5. As with all web design and development questions, the correct answer is: It Depends.

There are generally two schools of thought on this.

The "If It Ain't Broke Don't Fix It" school says that if you're site is working in Joomla 1.0, then why bother to migrate? It's doing what you want, so you don't need to change it. This certainly has some validity, in that you save money in the short term by not migrating.

Now that we've discussed section and category blogs, let's look at front page blog layouts.

Functionally, they're very similar to the section and category blog layouts. The major difference here is that instead of choosing a section or section/category to display on the front page (home page), you assign individual articles to appear on the front page.

In the Article Manager (column labeled "front page"), or within an individual article, you can choose to display an item on the front page. By default, the choice is no.