Keeping It Personal Keeps It Real.

The #1 over-arching goal at the beginning of the year was to provide excellent LIVE meetings for all members. While online efforts will always be part of the package, to help share information and insights, the purpose for any online efforts will continue to be to support the premise of providing excellent quality person-to-person meetings.

There's nothing like that personal contact, not only for quality learning purposes, but also to forge trusted relationships that webinars, emails and Skype just can't touch.

We presented a full slate of learning and business networking sessions in 2010, including new sessions on Joomla frameworks, audio and video for Joomla, Joomla 1.6, plus a "3-minute dating" format to enable everyone to get to know eachother better.

New Online Capabilities

We performed a major re-design to the site, all done by JoomlaChicago members. The new design is clean, it's stylish, and it's "Chicago!" We added quite a bit of functionality to our website, including a social networking element, using JomSocial, complete with Discussion Groups and apps, ProjectFork for project management, new online presentations, expanded Joomla Showcase section,  rather official "Terms and Conditions" legal documentation and more. We also expanded our blogging area to enable all members to blog on JoomlaChicago.com.

New Location In Chicagoland

After three-plus years at the swanky-swank headquarters of the Acquity Group, we finally outgrew each other. It was time to give a new location a shot, so we shifted to Durty Nellie's in suburban Palatine. Meeting attendance ranges from 35 to 45 participants, which is slightly down from the 45 - 55 downtown, but so far, so good!

Connections With Joomla.org

This year, Joomla.org continues to grow and expand. The parent organization, Open Source Matters Inc (NY based non-profit), has helped fund and foster Joomla's growth as well. Their working groups have implemented several new programs to assist user groups, and JoomlaChicago has been a benefactor of all that work. We participate on Joomla.org's JUG working group, and in 2010, earned its "official Registered User Group" status.

Looking Forward

We're very thankful for several new presenters who stepped up this year to present on a myriad of topics, including VirtueMart, CSS tips and tricks, E-Commerce solutions, Joomla Security and admin, and much more. This group is all about the members themselves, and their own willingness to give of themselves to share their insights with others.

We look forward to another growth year in 2011, helping our members meet their wide array of challenges when it comes to getting familiar with Joomla, ramping up their Joomla-powered sites, and pushing this amazing CMS to its limits.  Our annual planning meeting was today, in which we mapped out a tentative schedule for each and every meeting in 2011. We'll be posting that soon, and taking your feedback and insights over the coming month, in order to finalize, lock-and-load the schedule, and line up capable speakers to present! By the way, if you're a JoomlaChicago member, and you're interested in presenting, please contact us.

Thank you all again for a great year of working together in Chicago to help each other up to speed on the software, the trends, the techniques, the business strategies, and especially all the people who are at the helm, powering their sites using Joomla!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Linda and John Coonen
Co-Hosts, JoomlaChicago

If you haven't gotten started yet, now is the time to get involved in the Joomla Chicago online community.  In just the last few weeks, there have been daily increases in activity -- and that means more opportunities for all of us to network with other Joomlaistas and expand our web skills, our web activities, and our web businesses.

Try these three simple ways to get into the swing of things:

• * log onto Joomla Chicago and update your profile to tell the rest of us about yourself
• * take a close look at all those snazzy pictures of the other members and pick a few to "friend" - it's fun!
• * follow the links to recent updates to discussion posts. Add your two cents! You'll start getting emails as other people join the conversation

Get started now! You'll be amazed a month from now to see how many great connections you've made!

What's your favorite way to interact with the Joomla Chicago online community?

Ad agencies in Minneapolis are teaming up to tell a story: "Minneapolis is a powerhouse center for advertising services" -- read the full story in the New York Times.

Shouldn't we be doing something similar in Chicago, around the topic of Content Management System (CMS) services?

Not sure how to put a concerted effort together around this -- as the ad agencies did in Minneapolis -- how can we work together to make something like this happen?

Joe Scarry is head project manager for Chicago Joomla web developer and web design firm Arc Technology Group.

Let me share my newest discovery with you: go to Joomla Milwaukee and get signed up for their next meeting. I've been to two meetings so far and they've both been fabulous.

At yesterday's meeting there was a great, hands-on presentation by Tom Egan of Egan New Media about customization he did on a calendar module for a site he built for the Grand Prairie, TX, Air Hogs professional baseball team.

Dan Knauss of New Local Media provided an excellent overview of the planned Joomla 1.6. Key focus was on access control. (That's a presentation I'd love to see at our Chicago meeting!)

The level of discussion at Milwaukee Joomla meetings is really helpful: precise and practical, and edging on technical, but without being obscure.

One other interesting note: John Fischer, a member of the group, will be presenting a two-day program on "Joomla: Building Powerful Content Managment Systems and Onine Applications" at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) on April 30 and May 1. Tuition is :$525. See http://www4.uwm.edu/sce/course.cfm?id=17282 to register.

Once again, hats off to Victor Drover of Anything Digital and Gabriel Wahhab of Connexion Technologies for their leadership of this group.

Joe Scarry is head project manager for Chicago Joomla web developer and web design firm Arc Technology Group. Arc Technology is one of the sponsors of Joomla Milwaukee.