At J and Beyond 2010, a question was posed: Should the Joomla core be as lightweight as possible, or should it contain a lot of features (to cover a lot of needs)?

Most people at the conference raised their hand in response to the first one, Joomla being as lightweight as possible. But there might be advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

I'd love your comments on this - read on for more and leave your opinions in the comments. There are prizes to be won for the best commenters!

Not so long ago, someone left a negative comment on this blog. The comment was more negative than others and directed towards a Joomla template developer. The commenter had experienced trouble with his Joomla website and needed to place the blame.

Criticism is OK, but negativity and the language used was not something I care for on my blog. So I didn't publish it.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about the reason for the negative comment. Was the template developer to blame, or was it the user himself?

As you may know, all of the extensions listed in the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) are released under the GPL (Gnu Public License).

In simple terms, this means that anyone may use the code freely. They may also modify it and republish it. However, they have to attribute the original coder for their work. So, you could not take an extension from the JED and republish it without including the original copyright information. This goes for templates and translation files as well.

From time to time, there has been developers who didn't respect this. But, as with most things like this, its eventually discovered. Last year, a developer ripped off a weather plug-in from Rockettheme. There was a lot of commotion in the Joomla community about it, and the culprit had to apologize publicly. The damage was still done. And it takes a lot of time to recover from it.

There are numerous examples of Joomla templates being republished without the proper attribution.

This week - an example of a ripped-off plug-in surfaced in the Joomla community. Or wait... Did it really??

I started my business in 2001. At that time, my company evolved around creating web sites for smaller companies. This is my story.