Selecting Joomla! templates today often involves using a template framework such as Gantry, T3, Vertex, Warp, etc. Though these frameworks allow for flexible variations in a template, they often are complex and present their own learning curves and issues.
Our co-founder and longtime JUG member, Bruce Scherzinger, ran into an issue with the Purity III template when he was working on some site improvements after migrating to Joomla! 3.7.3. He diagnosed the problem as being a bug in the latest version of the JoomlArt T3 framework. He sent the details to JoomlArt and posted it on the Joomla! Forum. At this meeting, Bruce demonstrated and discussed the simple methods he used to discover and resolve the problem.
Bruce's early interest in Joomla! sparked the developer in him and he wrote some extensions to augment the Joomla! website he built for his HOA back in 2007. One thing the community residents needed was a convenient way to communicate with each other. He tried Mailman, a variety of newsletter components, and even PHP Mail, none of which fit the bill. His search ultimately led him to Dada Mail, an open source email list application written in Perl. Bruce devised a way to integrate it into Joomla! using Community Builder and has kept it current with the latest versions. Bruce explained how all this came about and how easy it is to integrate Dada Mail into a Joomla! site using his free extension.
He also spoke about Jasper iReport Designer, a tool he uses to produce printed neighborhood directories for his HOA directly from the Joomla! MySQL database.
His slides are attached here: NoVa JUG Presentation: Bruce Scherzinger - Technical Challenges.