I don't know about you but we used to have a spam problem. Until about 18 months ago, I was receiving about 30,000 spam emails a month. Six months before that it was only (only!!!) 20,000 and I knew I had a serious problem. I also knew that this was a problem that was growing all of it's own accord.

One of the biggest problems with getting so much spam mail is that legitimate mail

As a company we decided that it was time to not only make use of Joomla!, but also to start to contribute back to the wider community. Joomtraders is one of our efforts to try to do that. We are currently planning and developing extensions and templates that we believe will help Joomla! users everywhere.

I guess one of the strengths of being in business is the abilty to use your own team

One of the prerequisites to growing plants seems to be just adding water. Whilst sunlight, nutrients, climate and other things also have an impact on growth, to me water is one of the key factors. It is also a very useful metaphor for this topic.

As a new community we need to make sure that there are enough satisfactory requisites for growing. We recognise that there are several things that are important like advertising, value for money, and reputation. The primary item that we want you to consider helping with is to "just add water". The water we are talking about here is really meant to be describing what we see as this community helping itself and helping each other. A forum that has users focussed on helping each other creates a culture that allows users of all technical capability to be nurtured and grow.

One of the most frustrating things with running the hosting side of a Joomla! website has been navigating the problems that occur due to file ownerships and permissions. Installing Joomla! on a typical Apache webserver may consist of using an ftp program to copy files to the server, then running the install. After this comes the process of installing templates and extensions and this is where the problems begin for many people.

Often Apache webservers will assign it's own ownershp to files that are installed from within a Joomla site. This can be good if you want to use the same mechanism to remove the program but it can also be annoying if you want to modify permissions of the installed files. The files installed by Apache are not necessarily owned by the site user and therefore any modification becomes difficult. If you want to read more about this issue, check out the joomla.org forums. I do need to say that there are few things more frustrating as a Joomla! hosting company than getting regular phone calls or emails about resetting file ownerships. If you've been there then you will know what I mean.

One of the most useful extensions we have come across in the last two years is Gavick's News Show. This extension allows users to place content into module posiitons and does it with style and grace. This is by far one of the easiest, yet fully featured tools that we have been priveledged to use.

Unlike many sites who boast certain levels of functionality, Gavick's website says that you can "free your Website from limitations and win perfect control of content, news and articles" and we have found this to be true.

Without any hesitation we can say that we highly recommend this extension as one of the best we have used and we sincerely hope that Gavick continues to produce work of this standard. It has certainly made our lives a whole lot easier.

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