Many of our organizations are using Non-Profit Soapbox for their CMS, and when doing so also elect to utilize Google Apps for their email services. This means they receive two great tools: a content management system and an email administration system. Unfortunately, it also means that they have to utilize two different systems to manage these functionalities.

What if we could bridge that gap? What if we could provide an administrative control panel for Google Apps within the Joomla administrator?

After a point in the right direction by a good friend, it seems like this could become a reality. Google provides rather detailed PHP API for their provisioning system, including even an API for the Zend Google Data Client Library to access the Provisioning API functionality.

Using the API, one could build remote functionalities such as:

• managing user accounts
• managing nicknames
• creating email lists

Anyone built on top of this yet?

The Joomla! core team has done an amazing amount of work over the past 2 years to bring Joomla! 1.5 to life. This group of dedicated developers have given large portions of their daily lives to make Joomla! a powerful tool to empower millions of individuals around the world.

On this Thanksgiving Day, there's no better time for the Joomla! community to show our thanks and give back.

Last week I wrote a blog posting about how the community can help get Joomla 1.5 out the door. Now just a week later, we've got a plan of action. On the weekend of December 8 and 9, the US Joomla! community will have an opportunity to come together in New York, Washington, and California for the first ever Pizza, Bugs, and Fun (PBF) bug squashing event!

I get a ton of email. I truly believe that there are small gremlins in my laptop, building hundreds of emails a day for me to try to keep up with. Everyday, I lose the battle against email, and find myself flagging many of them for follow-up. This isn't too helpful though, because:

1. they're not actionable (there's no task associated with them)
2. it increases my blood pressure to see my follow-up email count rise to the current 424 level

In the rest of my Outlook life (that's right, I use Outlook 2003) I have created a task management system that allows me to create actionable items in my Task manager by categorizing everything I do into Musts, Needs, and Wants. This has actually worked pretty well, and has kept our Post-It note supply noticeably higher. Flagged emails, however, just make me look at the mess that is my inbox and realize this is a losing battle.

Until now.