Hey Stephan,

It lives here:

http://www.bestofjoomla.com/

It's got some changes from JoomlaBoard that I really do not like (a lot more crap on every page, and no easy way to get rid of it--they refer to it as "Improved pathway" and other sorts of "Improved" bits, but to me it's all just duplicated garbage that detracts from the point of a forum...but I'm weird that way...a lot of people seem to like really busy and complicated forums packages). And since it's the only supported variant now, I guess I'll have to run with it and figure out how to get rid of the extra crap.

BTW-It doesn't run under Mambo. I thought it worth mentioning, since Scott brought up Mambo, and often there is some compatibility between Joomla and Mambo (JoomlaBoard, for example, could be convinced to run with Mambo, I believe).

Came across the new site in development by accident, looks great! You've made Joomla look very, very streamlined.

Hey Vance,

Thanks for the kind words. My design skills are weak, but definitely improving (I've been hanging out with some famously great designers lately...I guess it's rubbing off on me). As you've noted, a lot of what I've been doing is reducing the complexity of the Joomla pages. Even the Joomla.org designers (who do as good a job as any that come to mind) haven't tamed the complexity.

Lately I've been fighting with URLs. I believe folks in the Joomla community have a really broken view of URLs. All of the components that address them are targeted to search engines! Why on earth would I care what a search engine thinks of my website!? I care what users think (and, interestingly, if take good care of my users, more people will link to us which will increase our ranking in search engines)! Joomla URLs are horrible for users. Working with Joomla all this time has reminded me why I chose OpenACS for this site...it gets a lot of things right that others get wrong. ;-)

Anyway, I'll stop rambling and get back to work. We've got a lot of stuff to launch (not just the website), and we'd like to launch it all sooner rather than later.