We're happy to launch the third of our in-depth courses for Joomla 2.5: Template Design.
Creating a fantastic look and feel for your Joomla site is important. You can buy templates, or even download and use free ones. But if you really want a unique look, you have to create one that really highlights your site's content.
This class will take you step-by-step from an initial design to a finished template.
Over the last few years, we've done our training all up and down the West Coast of North America. We've been to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and even Anchorage, Alaska.
After a break of 6 months, we're heading back out the West Coast this summer.
Next week is DrupalCon Denver, the biggest and best meeting of Drupal people from all around the world.
If you're going to be there, we'd love to meet you and will have OSTshirts for anyone who comes up and says "Hi!"
Don't worry if you can't make it, or would prefer a Joomla or WordPress event. There are at least five other major events coming up this year from Drupal and Joomla in Germany to Joomla and WordPress in California. Hopefully we'll see you at one of those events later in 2012.
Joomla 2.5 was released today and the slogan for it is "Extra Features! Easy Updates!" Both are true.
Updates: If you're using Joomla 1.7, it is a one-click update to 2.5. All your extensions and template will work with the new version. Also, you'll need see an icon when you first login and this will do what WordPress does and warn you and any updates to Joomla or your installed extensions.
It's been hard to go online this week and not encounter protests against the SOPA and PIPA laws which the U.S. Congress has been considering.
There was a huge amount of pushback from online organizations, and open source projects led the way. Here's how some of the biggest reacted:
2012 is here, our 2nd birthday is approaching in a couple of weeks. It is time for some thank yous. A lot of thank yous.
OSTraining is a new business that has been a long time in making. I used to work full-time as a teacher, doing webdesign in the evenings to pay the bills. From the beginning, the webdesign was powered by open source. My first Mambo ( Joomla ) site was in 2003. Three years later, as open source really started to become popular, the evening job was more profitable than the day job. So I went full-time with Alledia.com, where we did traditional webdesign and SEO services. But the urge to teach remained and over time the teaching side of Alledia grew until in 2010, I split it off into a separate company.
Still, at the beginning of 2011, OSTraining was just me and a large team of part-timers. A year later and we have the equivalent of 5 full-time staff members, plus an even larger team of part-time live trainers and video creators. So a big thank you to Rod, Nick, Ed, Thanh, Stacey, Tessa and everyone else who's worked with us this year.
Every year now brings us a major new Joomla, Drupal or WordPress conference:
In total, this year there will be six major Joomla, Drupal and WordPress conferences. We aim to send OSTraining team members to all of these events, and we'd love to meet you there. Whether it's WordPress and Joomla on the Pacific, Drupal in the Rocky Mountains or Joomla and Drupal in Germany, there's a lot of great opportunities for you to travel and learn.
Here are the six conferences, starting in March and running through to November:
Are you looking for a good excuse to get out of the office and head somewhere beautiful? DrupalCon Denver is coming up in March. It's going to be one full week of Drupal with sessions, business events, training and probably some ski trips too.
We're delighted to have been one of the first six training sessions announced for DrupalCon Denver.
This will be our third DrupalCon training in a row after both DrupalCon Chicago and DrupalCon London in 2011.
Find out more at http://denver2012.drupal.org and check out our training called the Absolute Beginners Guide to Drupal.
2011 is drawing to an end and I hope it's been a great year for you.
Here's a quick round-up of where our staff have been in November and where we hope to meet you in December (in short: Ohio, Lousiana, Florida, Washington, New York, Atlanta and Boston).
If you want to learn Drupal, be ambitious and aim high. Try building the most famous Drupal website in the world, WhiteHouse.gov.
This is just what you'll be able to do in our Drupal Intermediate class, which launches today in online video form.
In our Drupal Intermediate class, you'll learn how Drupal sites get built using the Fields, Views and the Panels modules. We go in depth with all three, and once you've finished learning about these three, you'll be ready to tackle building the WhiteHouse.gov website.
Today we're launching a redesigned version of the OSTraining newsletter.
Here are the three key changes and why we're making them.
Today marks a major milestone for OSTraining: 300 live Joomla and Drupal classes. That's more than every other company put together.
During the last three years, we've been to all over the United States, Canada and United Kingdom teaching people how to use Open Source software.
We're celebrating 300 live classes with a special offer: 30% off all classes for the next seven days.
Use the coupon code "300classes" to save on any Joomla or Drupal class. This code is valid from today until midnight on September 28th.
Congrats to Andy Poorman who won our "Upgrade at the OS Corral" competition. The goal of the competition was to upgrade from Joomla 1.6 to 1.7 in less then the existing record of 23 seconds. Andy was able to upgrade his Joomla site in around 15 seconds.
Andy's video proof is below. Click here for a more detailed tutorial on upgrading 1.6 to 1.7.
Drupal is one part of a three-headed Open Source CMS revolution.
Added together, Drupal, Joomla and WordPress run around 20% of all websites and over 70% of all CMS websites (via W3 techs).
We're really happy to announce today that we teach all of them online. Joomla and WordPress were available last year and now Drupal is here.
So, by buying a single subscription to OSTraining, you can now learn how to use all three of these revolutionary ways to build a site.
We're making some changes to our Joomla Classroom training and have three pieces of news for you, one good, one bad and one so-so.
Are you ready for a pleasant surprise?
You're not? It's too late in the week?
Tough luck. We're going to give you a pleasant surprise anyway. In fact, we're going to give you two.
Are you thinking about going to DrupalCon London in August?
Around 1500 Drupalistas from all over the world are going to be converging in Croydon in South London from August 22nd to 26th.
If you're thinking about going, but haven't yet made up your mind, we've got a great offer. We've got a free ticket to give away. That ticket is worth at least £336 ($536).
Here's how you can win the free ticket:
As an ex-pat Brit, it gives me great pleasure to say that we're coming home in August.
OSTraining is going to be providing Drupal training at DrupalCon London.
We're going to be teaching the Absolute Beginner's Guide to Drupal which we also taught at DrupalCon Chicago this spring. Both classes cover the same material as the beginner classes that happen regularly all across the United States.
We're delighted to welcome Rod Martin to OSTraining this week.
Rod's a "new" staff member only in a very literal sense. He's been working with us for 18 months now and any of you who have seen our Joomla videos will have heard and seen him before.
Rod is our Director of Online Training and will be helping us to provide you all with more great videos. Rod's also a great live trainer and he'll be teaching classes with us around the Mid-West and at some exciting events that we'll be able to announce soon.
We seem to be a company of ex-pats so it works out well that Rod's originally from Australia, grew up in Canada and now resides just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. He has worked in both the non-profit and for-profit worlds, in small companies and large corporations. We're also a company of teachers and Rod has been training people for over 25 years.
Rod plays ice hockey a couple of times a week and rides his Goldwing motorbike pretty much everywhere he can.
Follow him on Twitter at @navtomorrow.
OSTraining 
Drupal classes are coming to Florida.
Over the last year we've been slowiy expanding up and down the U.S.. We now run classes from Chicago and Boston in the north, down through New York and Washington D.C., and Atlanta. Finally we're now heading all the way south into Florida.
Why did we choose Tampa? Two main reasons:
Find out more about our Drupal classes in Tampa by clicking here:
It was 12 months ago when we officially launched our online Joomla training program; and since it's our 1st birthday, we are offering a very special deal.
Until midnight on Saturday, we are giving $220 worth of birthday presents to each person who signs up for a new subscription.
Here is the link to sign up and details of all the presents:
We're happy to announce that we'll be presenting a pre-conference training session: the Absolute Beginners Guide to Drupal, at DrupalCon Chicago next month.
The class will be identical to our normal Drupal beginner class that we've run dozens of times across the United States. Attendees get all the handouts and resources we provide at a regular class, plus the six months of after-class support.
The major difference is that the training will be the day before DrupalCon, Drupal's major international event.
The classes will be held on March 7th at University of Chicago's Gleacher Center, located steps from the conference venue. DrupalCon Chicago itself will runs from March 8-10 and will "feature dozens of curated sessions and panels from some of the most influential people and brightest minds within the Drupal community and beyond, as well as countless opportunities for networking, sprints, informal conversations, and more."
You can find out more at http://chicago2011.drupal.org.
Are you wondering what's new in Joomla 1.6 and Drupal 7? 
Drupal is taking off in Washington D.C.
At the beginning of 2010 we were running our Beginner and Intermediate Drupal classes every three months in Washington D.C.
The classes became increasingly popular so that by summer and fall we were running the pair every two months.
In November and December we tried once every month and that worked too. So, that's becoming our plan going forward in Washington:
We're going to be running a Beginner and Intermediate Drupal class in the second week of every month.
Here are the first class dates for 2011:
Last year in early December we reached a key milestone in our growth: 100 live classes.
That landmark coincided with the holiday season so we celebrated by giving back: we held a free class for 16 non-profit organizations in Atlanta.
Fast forward almost a year and last week we hit another milestone: 200 live classes!
Those Joomla and Drupal classes were held all across North America and England, from Los Angeles to London and from Vancouver to Miami.
This year's landmark also coincided with the holiday season and so we've decided to give back again, only bigger and better:
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"
10 years is a long time in this business.
Since we started in 2006, we've dealt with a lot of people and a lot of companies. Business relationships have come and gone. Not many have endured for 10 years. Our relationship with Rochen is one of the few that has.
For the last 10 years, we've hosted all our sites at Rochen. This site is running on Rochen right now.
We use Rochen ourselves, and we recommend them to our customers. Over the last 10 years, we've experienced a lot of hosting companies. Though during these years we’ve occasionally recommended hosting companies, we stopped doing so because of the negative customer feedback we received. However, when we send people to Rochen, they come back happy.
