Our third meeting was held on Thursday, October 11th at Robert Half Technology(NYPHP, http://www.nyphp.org,  was willing to continue hosting us, but as we overflowed the conference room last time getting a bigger space was important).    Robert Half Technology, http://www.roberthalftechnology.com/portal/site/rht-us, was kind enough to provide space and some light snacks for the meeting.

We had a brief discussion on template design and template clubs before
the meeting started.

Gary Mort gave a brief over of Community Builder.

Laura Gordon gave an overview of CBJuice and hosted a discussion on JACL.

Anthony Ferrera discussed developing in Joomla.

Mitch Pirtle discussed JoomlaCities, KickApps, and a little bit of
everything under the sun.

Afterwards, Mitch and a few others went to TGIF's to relax for a bit, grab little something to eat, and then headed home.

Here is a list of urls for different items that were discussed
during the meeting.

RocketTheme: http://www.rockettheme.com/

Rocket Theme is a template club. For $75/year you get access to all
their professional templates, and they add one template a month to their
collection. You are allowed to use these templates on up to 3 sites at
the same time, and can continue to use the templates you downloaded on
those 3 sites after your membership expires. There are other template
clubs out there that each have their own styles and features, so feel
free to let me know which ones you enjoy and we can add them to the list.

SiteGround: http://www.siteground.com/joomla-hosting.htm

Siteground is a Joomla focused web hoster that provides simplified
installation process for Joomla, servers they optimize for it’s use, as
well as collections of templates and extensions to use on your Joomla
site! If your looking to jumpstart your Joomla use, SiteGround could cut
out a lot of hunting around.

Compass Designs: http://www.compassdesigns.net/

A consulting company with a LOT of free articles they host on their
website(registration required) on using Joomla, designing templates,
etc. The owner, Barrie North, has published a few ebooks and has a book
coming out in December regarding using and designing in Joomla 1.5 –
many of the chapters for which he has early drafts posted on his site!
As an aside, it’s his ebook, the Joomla Admin Manual, that helped me
make the leap to the Joomla mindset.

Community Builder: http://www.joomlapolis.com/

If Joomla is the basis for a strong CMS to allow the site owner to have
control over the content of his website without needing a programmer,
Community Builder is the component for Joomla that gives you the basis
to turn it into a Community Site. While by itself it doesn’t provide all
the features you need – it is a vital element for other components and
plugins for those features! What is even better, it has almost no impact
to install it even if you don’t initially plan on using those features –
so it really is a no brainer!

CBJuice:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2613/Itemid,35/

Ok, so CB is great for building a community, and great for dealing with
under a hundred users doing management and such. But how do you handle
hundreds or thousands of users, find out who is logging on, and who
never comes back? Take 50 users from another site and import them into
your new Joomla site? CBJuice is a great little utility for doing just that!

JACL:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,387/Itemid,35/

Ok, so you have all your content up there, and now you need to provide
some fine grained access control beyond guest/registered/special users?
JACL is one way of doing this at the component or content level.

JUGA:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,2587/Itemid,35/

Is JACL a little too intimidating? JUGA is an interesting take on the
ACL issue. For me, JUGA seems easier to setup and configure, but does
require a bit more time setting up all your controls, as well as being
in early release so it is not quite as feature rich, in my opinion, as JACL.

Kickapps: http://www.kickapps.com/

Kickapps is a media file hoster – video, audio, photo’s, and much much
more! It’s a great application on it’s own for making simple social
websites where media files are the focus of your website.

Even better, Kickapps now integrates with Joomla! Letting you use your
Joomla userbase to access your secured Kickapps media!
http://www.kickapps.com/press/press-stories/press_20071011.php

JoomlaCities: http://www.joomlacities.com <http://www.joomlacities.com/>
and http://nyc.joomlacities.com <http://nyc.joomlacities.com/>

Joomla Cities will allow regional communities to create their own
community website, based on Joomla and to discuss and enhance Joomla! By
focusing on regions, we can get people together who are able to actually
meet in person for hackfests, help, and more! Hopefully, we can work
together to promote Joomla at a regional level, as well as working on
projects to enhance Joomla, teach programmers good coding practices, and
support Joomla. NYC will be one of the first sites to run a JoomlaCities
site, so we get to have a lot of say in what goes into it. These sites
should hopefully be live this weekend.

PageCache & Query Cache: http://www.joomlaperformance.com/

These two components can be used to dramatically speed up page
generation in Joomla. From personal experience, on a host untuned for
Joomla PageCache turned pages that took .3 seconds to generate to .001
seconds! While it has it’s limitations, it’s a great tool to help you
survive the search engine swarms or the Slashdot effect!

Well, that’s all I have for now, sorry for blathering onthank you everyone for comi