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We've been using Joomla for a long time, and over the years we've seen people do some things with their Joomla sites that are downright blasphemous to Joomla purists. So with that in mind, we've come up with a list of Ten Commandments for Joomla Users. We actually thought of more, but we decided to trim it back to keep the list to 10. Feel free to post some in the comments. I'm sure you can think of some.

See what I did there? You thought I was going to say "All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten," in reference to the book about how all of life's important lessons are learned in kindergarten, but I didn't. While it's true that much of what you learn in kindergarten - reading, writing, basic math, social interaction, sharing, being kind, etc. - is important to how you live your life throughout your life, it's not really all you need to know, is it? I don't think so.

My name is Cory, and I'm a domain name addict. There, I said it. Now I feel better.

I don't know how it started. It wasn't a big deal at first. Back when Network Solutions lost its grip (monopoly) on the domain name registration business, and the price of a domain name went from $35/year to down around $10/year, the cost of a domain name suddenly became much less prohibitive. I don't remember the first domain name I bought. I think it was probably CoryWebb.com. Once I bought one I was hooked.

Two-and-a-half years ago, I built a template toolkit for Joomla called Motif to aid in the development of custom templates for our clients. With Motif, we can build custom templates in a fraction of the time it took us to build templates before Motif, because it takes care of many of the repetitive tasks, and it comes with a set of shortcut functions that make a template developer's life much easier.

Fast forward two-and-a-half years, and we still use Motif on all of our clients' custom templates, and we love it. It's become quite painful to work on a template that isn't built with Motif because it is so easy to work with. I recently updated Motif to work with Joomla 1.6/1.7/2.5. During that process, I removed a few features that we never really used, and I added some features to make our job even easier. One of those features is an automatic LESS CSS compiler based on the php LESS compiler from Leafo.net.

Is Joomla a Do-it-Yourself CMS? Yes and no. Before I get into the question at hand, I want to tell you a story. A few months ago, I painted the bedroom that was to become my daughter's nursery. The picture that goes with this blog post is a picture of me painting the walls. All things considered, I think I did a decent job.