In 2004 I needed to create a website and email list for my Home Owners Association (HOA). After reading a lot about various ways to do this, I found Mambo and created the first site for the HOA with that. Within a few months it became clear there was going to be a fork, which meant I needed to keep my ear to the ground waiting to see how things would shake out. The site was not yet live, fortunately.

Eventually it was clear that the future was with Joomla!. So I converted the HOA site over to Joomla! 1.0.0. Early versions of Joomla! certainly had their shortcomings, but I liked the concept of it anyway, so I stuck with it. I never tried Wordpress, Drupal, or Typo3, which are the only ones I can remember being mature enough.

Initially I used Mailman as the email list system, but several HOA residents were put off by having separate logins for that and the website. So I had to figure something out. It was actually tech support for my hosting company who told me about Dada Mail. I had already been using Community Builder (CB) on the site because Joomla! did not have much in the way of user profile customization. So I wrote a CB plugin to make it easy to subscribe to the Dada Mail lists through the MySQL database. It worked great and is still supported through my Github account.

Eventually I started using Joomla! for other sites, such as my Indiana hometown, my immediate family, my father's R/C airplane hobby, a local Ruritan Club chapter, and even a political activism drive. And although I have never tried to make Joomla! anything but a hobby, I have been paid to develop a few small sites.

In 2009 I co-founded the Northern Virginia Joomla! User Group along with Dorothy Firsching, who is also very active in the Joomla! community and has participated in organizing several JoomlaDay events. In 2010, our JUG hosted JoomlaDay DC at the Microsoft facility in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was a huge success! But in the ensuing years our membership waned. So Dorothy created a Meetup.com group. This created a surge in membership, but only a small improvement in attendance at our monthly meetings, which continue to this day as virtual events (Zoom).

I still maintain my family, HOA, and high school class reunion sites and am one of the super admins for the JUG site (novajoomla.com). We've terminated the Meetup.com group simply due to costs (we do not charge a membership fee), and I developed a small plugin that allows site members to RSVP to our jUG meetings.

As I get closer to retirement age, I want to get back into Joomla! as a documenter and, hopefully, a developer. Joomla! will continue to be my hobby into my retirement years. I just love this community!

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