We are leaving home tomorrow to travel back to our old home town for a Carol Concert – a long way to go but it will be great to see family and friends before once more before Christmas.

Because of this I  will not be answering many emails or forum requests until Tuesday next week at the earliest!!! And rememebr when I come back I expect to have over a 1000 emails in my inbox (thatsabout normal for 4 days worth!
) so please be patient for your reply.

Phil.

I wanted to recommend www.itidiots.com which is run by one of my clients in his spare time.

The site is run by two IT enthusiasts who produce a weekly video show in which they cover various training topics for IT professionals. Their target audience includes those studying for their MCSE as well as people who work in, or support IT infrastructure for a living.

Everything they produce is freely available, and can either be downloaded, or streamed online.

Oh and one last thing, keep an eye out for a Phil Taylor special coming shortly, Nicholas Hill has asked me to guest present just as soon as I can find a few spare hours to make an appearance.

They also run Joomla

ITidiots – MCSE training video screencasts

On Thursday we will be moving to our newly built office, located just outside Tewkesbury UK. The Office is on the outskirts of a working sheep farm and has panoramic views of open countryside (and a motorway!).

As BT (The UK Phone Company) are so incompetent (Long story!) we will not get connected to phone lines and broadband internet for some time (Rumored to be 5th March when they will lay a new cable to the building and _may_ connect our services)

If you have an enquiry or a problem and you need to get hold of us urgently please call Phil directly on:

UK: 0800 358 5499 (Diverts to mobile – Free for UK landline)

International: +44 774 0188284 (International Cell Phone Charges Apply)

This weekend marks the first anniversary of our marriage! We were married on 8th October 2005 !

Therefore I am taking a long weekend away from the computer – back Tuesday!

Phil & Trevena (And Baby Taylor)

After a long day yesterday I am pleased to say that all our online sites, and automates systems are now working well again ! Yippee!!

Over this last weekend we finally completed the legal aspects of buying our new house, and now we have the keys we have moved in.

This means that I have not been in the office since Thursday, or any day over the weekend, so I’m sorry if you emailed me, I am now going through the emails this morning

Hey everyone.  I am writing this as I know if I don’t people will complain I am not repling to their emails.

I am away from the office, and not working, from now until the 1st August.  Tomorrow I am travelling to Leeds to give a presentation on Joomla Development to the UK Joomla Day on sunday.

Then on Monday I am going with my wife for our 20th week pregnancy scan (And hoping to find out the sex of our child!!! YIPPEE!)

The emails, work requests, transaction issues and everything else will no doubt back up and I will have to trawl through it the best I can on Tuesday next week.  At the moment I am shattered having worked extra this week to make sure I could take three whole days off (Something I have no done since I got married and went on my honeymoon last year.) I actually almost fell asleep driving home from the office tonight not good (Don’t tell my wofe – she will kill me!)

UK Joomla Day in Leeds will be a great day! Be sure to look out for updates on this site when we have the webcast published (Not a live one),  after the day I will also be publishing my presentation slides for you all to read.

But for now I am logging off, back in three days! Have Fun!

EMERGENCIES ONLY: Please call on +44 774 0188284 and I mean emergencies, I cannot be certain to be able to get to an internet connection at all, and for at least 8 hours over the next 3 days I will be driving :-S

Amanda Congdon has decided to move to L.A. to pursue opportunities that have arisen for her in Hollywood. She will be very missed by me, it was nice to see a female geek delivering my daily tech news with such style. See her archive at Rocketboom.com

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I have been talking to my wife about hosting a Joomla Developers conference in October and I wanted to float the idea and get some feedback from others.

The conference would be aimed at those developers with existing PHP/MySQL knowledge (We would not be teaching how to use PHP!) who wish to learn how to code Joomla Components/Mambots/Modules. The conference would be hosted near to the M5 motorway in the UK for easy access and would be over two or three days (Accomodation is cheap at Junction 9 or the M5 motorway)

The aim of the conference would be for attendees to learn the basics of Joomla component development hands on, how to use the basic Joomla API (Database class, Mainframe methods, patTemplate, user sessions, Mambots Functions etc…) and would have some indepth and intensive sessions involving code and examples. The conference would cover development in 1.0.10+ but we can also touch on Joomla 1.5 code.
This would be a great opportunity for some to meet myself, Phil Taylor, one of the original Mambo core developers and the first ever Mambo (now Joomla) Custom Commercial Component Developer (A long title!).

In order to make the conference viable we would need to have 20-40 attendees, each paying a yet-to-be-determined fee (To include accomodation – we would arrange that for you!!). If you would be interested please comment on the blog post and we will add you to our mailing list for when we have more information. If there is good interest we would hope to have confirmed dates and venue by July 31st.

This is for developers only – people who can already code a little in PHP, not people who know no code! (Just making sure you understand).

So feel free to provide your feedback!

Thanks to all those that responded so quickly after we announced we had a little spare time for more custom development. However we have now filled our quota of work and are unable to entertain additional requests for our skills at this time.

When our work load decreases we will post news to this site and also let members of our mailing list know, at that time we will entertain more requests for our skills.

Also, with the launch of Joomla 1.5 just around the corner, we are busy upgrading our own software to work with that new version of Joomla. You can look forward to some great new releases of old favorites as well as new components in the next few months.

I include below a few sites where you may find additional assistance in securing a programmer to help you,

http://www.jamboworks.com

http://forum.joomla.org

http:/www.joomlancers.com

I wish you all every success in securing the assistance you need for any custom development work you require.

If you emailed us about custom development then we hope to reply to you shortly, sorry for the delay, we are busy sorting through the requests (Over 100!) and we will select projects we think we can help with over the next few days. Successful requests will be informed by email, we are sorry but we will only contact successful applicants.

If we continue to have the same demand for Joomla custom development work as we are currently experiencing we will entertain the idea of increasing our staff levels AGAIN!