Open Source Training Blog

Open Source Training is proud to announce that Andrew Eddie, one of Joomla’s co-founders and major contributors, has joined our team of trainers to expand our technical content over the coming months.

In addition to his Joomla experience, Andrew has a very strong teaching background:

• He runs live Joomla training classes for in Australia
• He's created Joomla training videos
• He's written in-depth Joomla coding tutorials on his site theArtofJoomla.com.

We're delighted to keep recruiting the very best Joomla teachers. Andrew commented:

“I’m really excited to be joining Steve’s team of trainers to be part of building what I believe is the best centre for learning Joomla on the planet”.

Our Joomla template design class is live! This class covers everything you need to know about building and modifying Joomla templates.

It is free to all our current Joomla Training subscribers. This is the third class, in addition to the current beginner level and Search Engine Optimization classes. If you'd like to access to these three classes, visit our Joomla Training page to find out more.

Here's the final video teaser for our HTML, CSS and PHP coding class which launches today. Stay tuned for a special Early-Bird offer of $50 for 6 months of training and support:

Hi All

If you're going to be in Chicago for next week's CMSExpo, we'd love to meet you.

Come up to our booth and say "hello" to win some special prizes. Eight of our teachers will be there from all across the United States:

• Bill - Colorado
• Cory - Texas
• Gabe - Wisconsin
• James - Texas
• Jen - Massachusetts
• Rick - Florida
• Steve - Georgia
• TJ - California

They'll be talking on whole wide range of topics:

• Bill: Ground-Up JavaScript and PHP 5 Must-Know Techniques
• Rick: This Is Adobe Air and Building Your Open Source Web Business
• Jen: Joomla Site Builder 1, Joomla Site Builder 2, as well as moderating the Interactive Panels, Joomla in Action and Joomla Recap Q&A
• Steve: Training for CMS Clients as well as Write Answers: Writing For The Web

For this week's newsletter we've decided to mix it up with a whole variety of tutorials.

Our students ask us questions in the support forum and if they need step-by-step help, we create a tutorial for them.

Here are some of the best from the last two weeks.

Step-By-Step Joomla Tutorials

Today, Mediacurrent and Open Source Training are proud to announce a partnership. Open Source (OS) Training is a recognized leader in the content management system (CMS) training field. As a result of this collaboration, Mediacurrent will work to expand and grow Open Source (OS) Training’s Drupal division. For the last five years, OS Training and its owner Steve Burge, has been one of the preeminent leaders and at the forefront of the Joomla training movement. OS Training has produced hundreds of tutorials, conducted live training events throughout the world, and boasts corporate clients like Apple, IBM, Verizon, NASA, and Hewlett Packard. Steve is the also on the board of directors at Open Source Matters, the body that helps support the Joomla project. He also wrote the most extensive and viewed comparisons of Drupal v. Joomla on the web. Steve began to diversify outside of the Joomla world last year and started offering Wordpress and Drupal training across the United States. Ironically enough, Steve is based in the metro Atlanta area, just 20 minutes from Mediacurrent’s office. After a few discussions, it became apparent that a partnership made a lot sense.

"We are very excited about our alliance with Open Source Training,” said Managing Partner of Mediacurrent, Paul Chason. “They have been providing top-notch training services to individuals and blue-chip companies for years. Mediacurrent’s background, focus, and expertise aligned well with OS Training’s desire to roll out more Drupal based training offerings."

Mediacurrent’s role will be to provide subject matter expertise in Drupal and start building a diverse library of Drupal tutorials that will be tailored to beginner, intermediate, or advanced level users. We will eventually move further into live classroom and corporate training. OS Training will assist in curriculum development, logistics, and marketing. We are both particularly interested in training new Drupalistas in our immediate geographic vicinity (Southeast USA).

We're delighted to welcome another teacher to Open Source Training and our second in Canada. Joe Sonne is based in Ontario and runs the JoeJoomla.com site. His first class with us will be a Joomla beginner class in Toronto on July 20.

Joe has been involved with Joomla! since 2006. He has built many Joomla! websites for businesses and non profit organizations. He runs his own company Joe Sonne Marketing which specializes in integrated marketing strategies and tactics. Joe also co-founded two Ontario based Joomla! User Groups:

• JUG Toronto: http://toronto.joomla.ca
• JUG South West Ontatio: http://www.jugswo.com

We had some great news here at Open Source Training today ... just about the very best Joomla teacher around is joining our team. Jen Kramer is a trainer, web designer and author based in Vermont. Respected throughout the Joomla community, she:

• Started the first ever Joomla university course at Marlboro College Graduate Center where she teaches.
• Wrote the excellent "Joomla! Start to Finish: How to Plan, Execute, and Maintain Your Web Site".
• Runs the highly successful Joomla! User Group New England.
• Taught three different Lynda.com courses on Joomla, CSS and graphics.
• Will be the Joomla Track Leader at the CMS Expo in Chicago in May.

We launched our online Joomla training on Monday and we've had some great feedback. This is one of the best. Thanks to Tricia for allowing us to share the email:

"Hi Steve,

This is your most BRILLIANT idea yet! I LOVE this course!!! I’ve completed the first 5 sessions and can say, without hesitation of any kind, this is exactly what a true beginner to website design needs before taking any of the one-day, live seminars.

The level of comfort and the guiding the mind to the necessary organizational aspect is phenomenal! We’ve been fumbling with a video here, a video there, and just about every book and written course available for Joomla, and that sense of compassion for the absolute beginner is missing from all of it. There always seems to be something missing that ties all of the information together.

If the rest of the course does what the first five sessions have done, I’ll be a pro in no time! I’ve never come across anything I couldn’t learn until website design, and that’s because the “heart” or simplest elements have been missing. This quality of the course and Rod’s soothing voice and genuinely friendly, welcoming manner add to this feeling of “I will finally be able to do it.”

Thank you for this course, my friend!

Kindest regards,

Tricia"

We just had this wonderful email from one of our Joomla training clients. Paulo and his team came to the class knowing nothing about Joomla, but on a

"Just wanted to share our success. :)

Back in December 10,11 we (my coworkers and I) went to a Joomla Training and we had nothing. I think I even told you that we needed the website up by the end of January, and you're like... "that's gonna be hard". Well... it was, but we did it. :)

I'm still implementing more functionality to the site and giving more power to the editors, but we have the site up and running beautifully, with 277 articles, 25 sections, 88 categories, and around 40 editors. The church purchased CommunityACL and It really works well. Every user has access to only their areas and JCE lets them have access to only their folder in the server.

So, that's it... We did it.

Check out: http://www.fba.org

Thanks!

Paulo"