Where is "part 2

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Where is "part 2"

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Written by Marco Conti Friday, 07 August 2009 20:38

There is no doubt that my article on Joomla!, Dreamweaver and Firefox development is very popular. It's by far the most read article on my site and I receive emails regarding it on a weekly, almost daily basis.

My motivation for writing the book is not exclusively (or even primarily) financial. There really isn't a lot of money in niche technical books and the amount of work that goes into a project like it it's staggering.

Since I wrote the first article 3 or 4 years ago I developed my system beyond merely using Dreamweaver and Firefox to edit Joomla! Templates, but I have expanded it to encompass all aspects of developing Joomla Web Sites. I have even adapted the same method to other web scripts and I have added a great deal of tools and techniques to the basic work flow.

In the past year or so I have even started teaching other web designers and developers how to use my system. I currently have over 30 students and I am adding more every week (time is really my only limitation - web development is still my main business). It seems that a lot of "traditional" web designers are discovering scripts like Joomla! and Wordpress, and my Dreamweaver based method is the perfect "bridge" for many of them to take the jump and learn what is a very different way of thinking about web design and development.

A few months back I realized that even a series of blog posts would not be enough to really explore all the possibilities of using Dreamweaver with Firefox, Firebug, Notepad++. I have personally learned a lot about how Joomla works and I successfully developed methods to use Dreamweaver to edit Joomla core files, modules and even create your own Joomla extensions or customizing existing ones. Plus I have added many other tools, discovered bugs, created tutorials, exchanged ideas, etc. I grew both as a developer and as a teacher...

I other words, I realized I had a book on my hands.

My motivation for writing the book is not exclusively (or even primarily) financial. There really isn't a lot of money in niche technical books and the amount of work that goes into a project like it it's staggering.
My real motivation is to "evangelize" Joomla to the widest possible audience and hopefully see more and more web designers and developers move away from old style "static" web sites and into modern, client-empowering, dynamically driven web sites.

I believe that if more and more developers abandon the old way of building sites and start building more web sites using Joomla or any other "best of breed" CMS or Blog script, the World Wide Web will become a better place to be. A place where all kinds of people and companies, even those without a deep technical pool, can publish their content, sell their products and contribute to the general empowerment of all web users.

It's all about the great promise I saw in the World Wide Web back in 1994 when I first loaded "Mosaic" onto my Mac Laptop and I thought to myself: "I have got to learn this!".

At the same time, I have been feeling guilty about abandoning my readers and not updating the famous "part 2" of my article. But I truly believe the book will be a lot more useful and a lot more popular than my blog could ever be and I hope you, the readers, will find it in yourself to forgive me.

Plus, I hope the book is going to awake Adobe or some other company and inspire to improve their tools so that building dynamic web sites will become even easier.
While Dreamweaver does a splendid job of making the development in Joomla faster, more accurate, more accessible and far easier than the alternatives, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Or maybe some open source project like Eclipse will see something in the book and some talented developer may add those tools currently missing in the major Open Source IDEs that make Dreamweaver the only real option (aside from Microsoft Web Espression) for those that prefer their coding a bit faster and more intuitive.

Who knows? Maybe a year from now we will have a new version of Dreamweaver or a real open source alternative that will make my method even faster and more intuitive. One can only hope.

In the meantime, please forgive me for slacking off with this "part 2". I hope to make it up to you all with a great book that will be even more helpful and useful.

In the meantime, if you want to help me write the book, read this other article about it or go directly to my book survey.

Thank you

Marco - cc