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CMS Expo IV is ON for this May 3-5th in Chicago, and it's bigger, better, and busier than ever! Joomlashack University is very proud to sponsor this amazing and can't-miss event.

Not only is CMS Expo a hotbed of the world's leading Joomla experts, developers, and trainers, the conference has expanded to include learning tracks and presentations on a wide range of the world's best open source Content Management Systems.

Joomlashack's annual holiday charitable campaign is back with a new twist: We'll match your donations!

For the fourth year, Joomlashack is rallying our community to support a worthy charity during the holiday season.

This year we're supporting the important humanitarian efforts of Doctors without Borders (aka Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.)

For every dollar contributed by our community, Joomlashack will match up to a total of $1,000. Other partners may match even more!

What is Médecins Sans Frontières?

Joomla turns four years old today (September 16th). Let's celebrate!

Joomla Birthday Special: 40% off any template in the Joomlashack store, including our incredible Developer Club value- over $160 in savings! Voucher details below.

It was Friday, September 16th, 2005. Yahoo.com was 25% more visted than Google, Weather Channel was the most used site on mobile phones, and TechCrunch was "staggered" by the news that Facebook.com had almost 4 million members.

With the headline, "Baby Joomla Cut's its First Tooth", a new web star was born.

What Joomla-powered sites have the highest Google PageRank? (Hint: Joomlashack's PageRank is 9. Think we made the top tier?)

How many Joomla-powered websites in the world are there? And how many of them are highly trafficked, really successful sites?

A group of Joomlaheads led by Alex Red has set out to answers these any many other questions about the size, depth, and characteristics of the Joomlaverse. Their site is www.joomla.me

Joomla.me is a directory of Joomla-powered websites. The team analyzes and makes some interesting claims using data from the directory, including:

Imagine yourself updating over 1,000 websites with the latest version of Joomla 1.5.

A nightmarish struggle against the clock that would take so long that 1.5.13 would be out before you had half of the sites updated, right?

Not for Simplweb.com, the hosted "Joomla on Demand" service from our sister company.Total time to update? Under 20 minutes!

Since the SXSW showdown in March of 2009, it seems the beat of the fans drums of Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal has been getting louder. I don't know if its my imagination, but I have seen more and more blog posts about comparing thee three great open source platforms.

Or maybe bloggers know people are searching and just want to get traffic for joomla vs wordpress vs drupal ;)

Anyway, I digress...

A while back I did a post How to choose between Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal that got a lot of interest, but it wasn't too serious, and really, I ducked the question.

So here goes...

The Joomlaverse was abuzz a few weeks ago about the launch of the Joomla Resource Directory, the Joomla community's official directory of designers, developers, and Joomla-related service providers. The directory, replete with listings for Joomlashack, our hosted and supported Joomla-on-demand service Simplweb, and Compass Designs, can be found at http://resources.joomla.org

But here's the big question: Is the JRD driving traffic to Joomla providers?

Recently I wrote an article that proved to be immensely popular. I then thought it would be good to reach out to a favorite Joomla! blog of mine: Compass Designs. Here is a companion piece to my original post on promoting your Joomla content, Five (more) tips to promoting your content.

Just got back from a great two days at the 2009 Chicago CMS Expo, the 3rd CMS Expo in the US since inception in 2007. It was great to see dev's from Drupal and Plone rubbing shoulders with the Joomla regulars. As were the previous two , the event was another successful, well orchestrated event. We even had Joomla and Drupal songs!

There seemed to be interest in my session on Socializing Your Joomla Site and I was able to give away some pre-release copies of the Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide (2nd Edition) and Fundamentals of Joomla! (Video Training).

Of particular note was the one of the key notes by Wilco Jansen, the Joomla Development Coordinator and an OSM board member talked about the importance of engaging the community. He also answered questions about 1.6 on the experts panel, and talked a little about the GPL in his SDRnews interview.

You can also check out the CMS Expo 2009 Wrapup from John and Linda Coonen, also on SDRnews.

Brian Clark and Jon Morrow over at Copyblogger just released an interesting free 31 page report about outsourcing for web entrepreneurs. I think there has definitely been a growth in the perception that outsourcing is the secret to being successful these days:

• All the "get rich quick" gurus seem to have outsourcing as a key part of their business model
• Overseas "rent-a-coder" type sites that offer cheap labor are becoming more and more prevalent
• Quite a few Joomla-based shops even have outsourcing as a key aspect of running their company business
• Even design is getting outsourced, as evident by all the PSD to HTML sites that have sprung up

Brian and Jon make the argument that outsourcing is not all that its cracked up to be, especially for those who 'they" say its best for... new people with a new idea they are trying to launch.