Hi.  I'm John Muehleisen, and I've been working on Joomla based websites for the past few years.

I'm based in Kampala, Uganda in east Africa where I am the Regional Strategist for World Gospel Mission Africa , a Christian NGO that does church work, education, agro-forestry, medical, community health and development, well-drilling, AIDS education, prevention, and treatment, orphanage and street children's ministries, and other similar things.

I had started trying to learn Joomla (actually starting with Mambo) to help put some websites together to help promote some of the work we are doing here in Africa.  I needed a system that was easy for folks here in Africa to update, and could be supported from a distance, and a browser based Content Management System was a perfect solution to the problem.

I'm originally from the Cleveland, Ohio area, but I've lived in Africa for most of the past 20 years.  I raised my family here (Africa is a great place to raise kids!  Really!).   When we moved to Africa, our two daughters were ages 2 and 4, and they are very African in their approach to life.  That means that relationships are very important, life should be enjoyed a day at a time, and community is as important as self.

So, What About This Site?

I put this site together originally for myself.  I had gotten a new template and I wanted to fool around with it and start learning how to use various parts of Joomla itself.  I was just really starting to get my head around "the Joomla way of doing things."

So, I put together some articles, added a few links, and made it a place where I could put cool Joomla stuff and "how-to-do-it" articles and links.

And, I put a bunch of newsfeeds on it as well to make it a great place to read my Joomla newsfeeds and introduce others to the whole concept of RSS.

And, for quite a while I was the only one who knew it where it was.  I had it in a folder of one of my own websites, and with no external links pointing to it, it was my private thing.

And then a "Joomla" thing happened

And that was fine for a while.  But then, I started to convert more and more of my websites over to Joomla (I had about 10 websites for non-profit organizations that I had done in Microsoft's FrontPage) so that other people could help maintain them rather than me being the "go-to-guy" everytime something small needed to be changed on the website.

So, I started pointing these Joomla newbies to this site, and even put a link to it on the menus of the websites I did (with the access level set to "special" so only the web editors would see it) and folks found it helpful.

Every time I'd get a "Hey, John!  How do I ?" type of request, I'd write a walk through, or more often, find a tutorial already written out there in the Joomlasphere and link to it.

And, so the site developed.

Meanwhile, Out in the Forums

As I was trying to learn how to do more and more with my various Joomla sites (by now, I had done about 40 of them for friends and organizations that I have some relationship with), I found myself in the Joomla forums quite a bit.

I learned a lot there, and continue to do so.  And I found that I started to know the answers to some of the questions that were being asked!  I had worked through that issue just a week or so before, so I started to post some replies to other people's queries.   And again, I started putting the anwers I had written and the links to other resources together and added to my site even more.

So, it continued to evolve.

Jump to a Rainy Saturday Afternoon

Then, one Saturday afternoon, I got an itch to buy another domain name (to add to my growing collection).   So, I started looking for a good domain name for my "Getting Started with Joomla" site.  www.gettingstartedwithjoomla.com seemed a bit long, so I played around a bit with various options but could not come up with something I liked.

Then, I decided to try "Welcome to Joomla."   It was available, so I bought it.

So, now you are reading my effort to index some resources to help you on your  path of creating a great Joomla site.  And, I hope that you find it of some benefit.