A few weeks back I made a deliberately provocative post entitled "Even Wordpress Usability Sucks" and ended with the suggestion that Joomla form a Usability team. It looks like one is starting to roll.

Congrats to Kyle from Joomlapraise, Chris from JoomlaJunkie and the others in the Joomla UX group on people.joomla.org for getting this started. Here's how you can help:

1) Join the people.joomla.org group and get involved.

2) Reply to Kyle's post today with an initial set of areas to work on.

3) Check out Marco Barbosa's Minima template. He's been working in this area for several months now and trying to imagine what the Joomla 1.7 admin area might look like. You can test his prototype at: http://marcobarbosa.com/minima/administrator/ Login with demo / demo. Leave feedback here.

Wonderfully smart readers ... I need to pick your brains.

We've been using Pingdom for years to track our sites. I love it. When sites go down it sends out an automatic email, SMS and even a message via an iPhone app.

When our servers go down, we know.

However, that's not the same thing as saying when our sites go down, we know.

This weekend a site was hit by a session error and that bought the site down. All a visitor could see was a MySQL error and the message "please repair the database". Because the server was still responding, Pingdom thought the site was up and so didn't tell us about the problem.

Any ideas on how we can get around this? How can we get notified even when our server is active but our site is throwing out errors?

We've been to over 50 cities in North America from Anchorage in Alaska to Miami in Florida.

There aren't many places left on the list of place we'd like to teach. There's Hawaii of course (we very nearly had a client invite us there) and Puerto Rico too.

However, there is one gaping hole in our U.S. coverage ... Boston.

No longer. Next week we'll be in downtown Boston teaching Joomla and Drupal for 2 days each.

What's even better is that I'll be teaching with the wonderful Jen Kramer. If you don't know who Jen is you will shortly. She's a mainstay of the Joomla world:

Jen Kramer

Jen is a senior faculty member at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, teaching courses and workshops in web site design and management, including Joomla. She has also previously taught at Champlain College, the Community College of Vermont, and the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University. Jen is a Lynda.com author for the titles "Joomla! Creating and Editing Custom Templates", "Joomla! Advanced CSS" and more. Her first book, “Joomla! Start to Finish” was published by Wrox Press/Wiley in January 2010.

One of my Joomla clients has been hacked by a phishing scheme and it has been a major pain to cleanup. Besides being behind a couple versions in their Joomla, there are multiple third party components installed.

I have been looking at a couple of Joomla security products to help in the process and to use to prevent this in the future. I was wondering if any of Steve's readers had experience with them, could tell us all about their experience with them, and possibly mention any others they would recommend? I have been looking at RS Firewall and SecureLive.

Out of all the blog posts I've read this year, one has stuck in my mind more than any other: Why [the] open source crowd should stop crowing about Ning’s problems. He takes on Drupal and KickApps for their lack of usability and then moves on to Wordpress.

He's right. Even Wordpress usability sucks. It's generally regarded as the best of the Open Source projects in terms of usability, but even it sucks.

My apologies for the lack of blog posts here over the last few months.

Between the Open Source Matters board and getting a new company off the ground with Open Source Training it's been a hectic year. In the last few weeks I took a working vacation to  Germany for JandBeyond and then back home to England.

I've been blogging but my limited time and energy has gone into Joomla.org rather than here. Still, there are quite a few things I'd like to write about that aren't appropriate for Joomla.org so look for some new articles here in the next few weeks.

Here's a recap of my Joomla.org posts:

This was the third year of the CMS Expo in Chicago and it took another leap forward. Rather than getting lost in downtown or suburban Chicago they've moved to the suburb of Evanston, right on the lake and next to Northwestern University. It's a good fit for a conference of 300 to 400 people.

Was it worth going? Absolutely. I've only missed one Expo out of the four and wouldn't make that mistake again. Here's what stood out to me this year:

• More Drupal and other CMSs. Although the people and sponsors were at least 50% Joomla, this was the first time that it became a true CMS event. Drupal was there in a big way. Wordpress were disappointingly absent as their Wordcamp San Francisio coincided with the event, but a host of other smaller CMSs attended.

• Cloud, cloud, cloud. We had the sponsors' booth next to Acquia and I couldn't help but notice that they promoted Drupal Gardens almost to the exclusion of their other products. I'm not sure whether that's because they thought it was the best fit for this audience, but it was hard to avoid the cloud everywhere I went. CloudAccess were getting ready to launch demo.joomla.org and lots of other companies had cloud-hosting products.

• An industry is growing. Many companies still only support one CMS which means we currently have lots of separate industries. However, nearly all the companies in attendance realised that smart companies are now supporting several CMS platforms.

• CMS Expo broke even for the first time. These events are always expensive and risky so that was a big step forward to ensuring the Expo's long-term stability.
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