Community

We received an email from a customer recently that reminded us of a core Joomla value.  Whilst it's nice to have the fanfare of opening high profile public Web sites on software you helped write, Joomla's main edge has been it's ability to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things.  The following story epitomizes this paradigm.

JXtended's Louis Landry has been selected as Joomla's Most Valued Person in the Packt 2009 Open Source CMS Most Valued People awards, and deservedly so.  Louis has contributed to many aspects of the Joomla project and is currently one of the coordinators responsible for overseeing development of the software.

The staff at JXtended wish to congratulate Louis on his well deserved achievement.  Well done!

JXtended now has its own page on Facebook and it would be great to show your support by becoming a fan.  If you have a site running any JXtended extensions and you would like show it off, post a link on our wall.

JXtended's own master architect, Louis Landry, will be hosting one of the best training classes you will ever attend if you are an up-and-coming Joomla developer.  In conjuction with Joomla Day Las Vegas, on 3 April Louis will be running Joomla for Developers, a tutorial/workshop style half-day session that looks will give you a deeper appreciation for how to build Joomla extensions.

Those attending this training course will also receive a free 12-month subscription to The Art of Joomla Developer Reference which is maintained by Joomla master developer Andrew Eddie.  This adds great value to the day.

And why not round the day off by also attending Anthony Ferrara's session on Using the Joomla Framework.  This is be a great compliment to Louis's workshop by another of Joomla's top core developers.

Time is running out and the class is filling so hurry to sign up.  Similar classes around the world have booked out and you don't want to miss being trained by the people that actually write the Joomla software.

February 7 and 8 presents a unique opportunity to catch up with the JXtended Developers in Melbourne, Australia.  Louis Landry, Rob Schley and Andrew Eddie will be presenting at the 2009 Melbourne Joomla Day.  The event will be held at The University of Melbourne (Parkville Campus, city).  Lunch is provided on the day as well as drinks in the evening - an excellent time to sidle up to us and other Joomla experts.

On Sunday, Andrew will be holding a developer training workshop.  This will be a great time to explore how to build Joomla extensions.  Rob and Louis will also be available for individual consulting sessions.  Spaces for the workshop (only 7 left) and the Joomla Day conference are limited and filling fast.  Don't miss out.  Book at melbourne.joomladay.org.au today.

The JXtended Team - Rob Schley, Louis Landry and Andrew Eddie - is currently in Australia, having met with the other Joomla Development Coordinators for the first ever Joomla Development Summit - a grueling four days of whiteboard planning and coding.  We are very excited to announce that we are donating a number of JXtended technologies to the Joomla 1.6 source.

Comments

We are donating our Comments extension to Joomla 1.6.  We feel very strongly that this move, along with access control improvements, will put Joomla in better standing with other Content Management Systems.  We will still be releasing and supporting the commercial version for Joomla 1.5 but will be providing an upgrade path to Joomla 1.6.  Comments for Joomla 1.6 will go into the core just prior to the first public beta release.  Choosing JXtended Comments now gives you the smoothest transition into Joomla 1.6.

I had the pleasure of attending the most recent Joomla Day San Francisco Bay Area last weekend. Like every other Joomla Day I have attended, this event did not disappoint.

These events are always my favorite to attend and really tend to exemplify what the Joomla community is all about. There are always interesting people to meet, great debates and conversations to have, and new friends to make. The event was facilitated by the talented Allen "Gunner" Gunn, Executive Director of Aspiration. Gunner is the master of the unconference and his events are always beneficial for everyone who participates.

The event was planned and organized by the people of the Bay Area Joomla User Group and graciously hosted by Google via the Google Open Source Programs Office. A special thanks and "Love Bomb" goes out to Leslie Hawthorn, program manager at the Google Open Source Programs Office (who also runs Google Summer of Code and the Google Highly Open Participation Contest) for being ever-helpful and making everyone feel so welcome.

I stumbled upon a post in the Joomla forums about speculation surrounding the mysterious origin of ID 62 for the default Joomla Super Administrator.

Fortunately, and many years ago, I pulled down all the historic downloads for Mambo (from which Joomla spooned, I mean spawned) and decided to look through them. The earliest version of Mambo I had was from 30 April 2001 being what I think was version 3.0.0. The install script for this version has the default user ID set to 1. This is the same for the next five versions but in verison 3.0.6, released around 27 July 2001 we see the first introduction of the now famous ID 62 for the Super Admin. Version 3.0.7, released in November 2001, and then the first of the 4.0 series, released a year later in November 2002, carred on the tradition (I joined the project in February of the following year).