DVS Shoes is hip. Any association with the action sports shoe manufacturer garners a certain amount of recognition. A mere mention of the name upon any website will earn amiable attention in the form of web traffic.

It seems as if every time an industry convention or some business mixer emerges, my calendar shuns the event and any hope of mixing it up with forum friends and community colleagues. And when it comes to this year's inaugural Open Camp, which takes place this August 27-29 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Addison, Texas, there is no exception, as it conflicts with one of my favorite stateside desert off-road races, the 2010 Best In The Desert (BITD) Vegas To Reno on August 19-21.

I dabble in Drupal. I work with Wordpress. But I'm always jamming with Joomla. The CMS framework is ultra extensible and includes numerous native Joomla extensions and a multitude of others that form a bridge to other popular software applications. Moodle, phpBB, Wordpress, SMF, OpenX are just a few hot scripts you may have your way with when working with Joomla. Well, here are some of the hottest Joomla extensions I happened upon during this morning's work with my favorite content management system.

It's free. It's clean. It's quick. And while it may be one of the cleanest free Joomla templates I have used in recent years, the intuitive user interface design of the Joomla Praise Joomla AdminPraise Lite Template does take some getting used to, as the key elements of the administrator interface are laid out completely different than the default Joomla admin template. Amid the biggest drawbacks of the fashionably clean design is realized when it the templates default form, when it comes to editing content items, but amid it's greatest features is that its admin interface is highly-configurable according to your specific work flow characteristics.

Recently the DIRT FORGE Blog performed a migration from a Wordpress blog on a sub-domain to a JoomlaWorks K2 blog wrapped within the Joomla CMS framework installed upon the root domain. While Wordpress remains one of easiest all-around web development platforms, especially for websites that require the capabilities of a blog or content management system (CMS), it has its limitations, particularly for projects that require or may require a relatively high level of integration with more mission specific software applications, such as e-commerce, photo gallery, file download repository and forum software. This is where the Joomla CMS framework excels.

I remember the days. I worked straight HTML. I wrote like a mad man. Lived the ultimate off-road lifestyle and documented the insanity by means of a camera, a keyboard and often times a satellite internet connection. Those were the days of Off-Road.com. There were editorial days that existed long before the ORC era of my life, but they do not size up to the workload, responsibility nor adventure. Traffic at ORC was ultimately bolstered by informative and often humor-laced excitement. And during that era of my life, it was far more difficult to web publish that excitement as it is today. Straight HTML via notepad and then manually publishing links via FTP file upload for an array of primary directory pages was an extremely tedious task. Homesite soon eased the HTML editing woes but also inserted erroneous code. Fortunately, Macromedia Dreamweaver segued onto the scene has long proven to be a standard asset in my code-slinging repertoire.