After the release of Joomla 1.6 GA, it's just natural to have a chat with the lead developer: Andrew Eddie.

Andrew has been with the Joomla project since the Mambo days and has been leading the Production Leadership Team for some time now.

I managed to get some thoughts from him around the release of Joomla 1.6. Read on for an interview with "Mr. Joomla" where he talks about the process leading up to the release, new features, and feelings around community involvement.

In the wake of the Joomla! 1.6 release this week, there are a lot of questions buzzing around.

Among them are questions on how Joomla 1.6 will impact the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED).

I talked to Matt Lipscomb of the Community Leadership Team, and JED/JRD Co-Manager. He had some interesting thougts to share around the subject.

This week, I've been talking to David Hurley of WebSparkInc.com. They're the company behind the project management software JForce, which plugs right into Joomla! as a component.

Read on to get to know David and perhaps learn something from his experiences developing software for Joomla!. 

When I was at J and Beyond earlier this year, I met Aarti Mahajan. She's not a Joomla developer. She's not a Joomla site integrator. She does not sell anything related to Joomla. She doesn't even use Joomla. So why was she there?

It turned out she's conducting the first economic study on Joomla ever. Read this interview to find out more about her exciting research project and how you can contribute. This is something that will benefit us all.

This week, I have the pleasure of introducing Marco Barbosa. Marco is a Brazilian working and living in Sweden, with a glowing passion for Joomla.

He's known to some of you as the guy behind Minima, the exciting new admin template for Joomla 1.6, as well as an active contributor in the Joomla UX group at people.joomla.org.

This week, you'll meet Hilary "Hils" Cheyne. She's a British web developer and an instructor of online Joomla! Fast Track Training Course at LVS Associates.

She's also involved in the Alltogetherasawhole.org site, as well as an active contributor to the recently launched Joomla Community Magazine.

Join me as we get to know Hils a little better.

This week you'll get to know Anthony Olsen from Melbourne, Australia.

Anthony is an active Joomla developer and designer with a minimalist style. You might know him as the founder of the successful template and extensions company Joomla Bamboo. He's also an active voice in the Joomla community. Both on Twitter, as a blogger and lately as a contributor to the Joomla Community Magazine, where he's the Design Studio editor.

I'm pleased to announce the first "Meet a Joomla user" post here at the blog. This is a way of learning more about the people behind those tiny online avatars.

The first interview is with Alice Grevet, whom I've come to know a little through Twitter and Skype.

Alice is a positive and energetic lady who's spreading the Joomla love all over. Lately, she became involved in the Joomla! Community Magazine team. Take this opportunity to get to know Alice a little better.

At J and Beyond, there was a so-called 'lightning sessions'. During these sessions, people had the opportunity to talk briefly about something they're working on. Or something they've experienced. Or something they feel strongly about.

Basically, the lightning session was an opportunity for people to shed some light on things that the audience might not have heard about before.

One lightning session that stood out to me was the one from Jisse Reitsma. He told about going to India to teach Joomla as volunteer work. This sounded interesting, and after the session I asked Jisse to tell more about his experience. The result was this video.

When I visited "J and Beyond" in Wiesbaden earlier this month, I met Emmanuel Danan. He's a French developer and the inventor of FLEXIContent and FLEXIAccess.

In this video, Emmanuel talks about how FLEXIContent and FLEXIAccess came to be.

FLEXIContent is a content management system that ties into the content database in Joomla.