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Written by Joomla! User Group of Houston on . Posted in Site Pages.

About Houston JUG — The Joomla User Group of Houston

We're Houston JUG — a virtual Joomla community, open to anyone, anywhere

A free, open online community for anyone who builds, manages, or is curious about Joomla — the open-source content management system that quietly powers more than a million sites worldwide.

We're rooted in Houston, but the meetup is fully virtual and the door is open to attendees from anywhere on the map. Whether you're a long-time Joomla user, a freelancer or agency evaluating CMS options for clients, or someone shopping for an alternative to the platform you've outgrown, you're welcome here.

What we do

  • Monthly virtual meetups — first Thursday of every month at noon Central, on Google Meet. One Joomla feature per month, walked through live. Recorded and posted to YouTube. Attend from wherever you are.
  • The Showroom — a live Joomla 6 demo site (showroom.jughouston.com) where every meetup demo runs. Visit it, follow along, see the features in action.
  • Curated extensions guide — our shortlist of free and paid Joomla extensions worth knowing about, with vendor links and JED references.
  • Tutorials and recap articles — every meetup gets a written follow-up with the key takeaways, demo steps, and links.
  • A place to ask questions — subscribe and you can email us directly when you're stuck on something.

Our story — a phoenix from the ashes

The Houston Joomla community has been around in various forms for over a decade. The earlier Greater Houston Joomla Users Group brought local Joomla enthusiasts together for years before going dormant.

Houston JUG is the rebirth of that community — same Joomla mission, same Houston heart, but rebuilt for a virtual-first era. We picked up where the original group left off, restructured around online meetups so anyone with a screen can join from anywhere, and committed to publishing every session as a permanent learning resource on YouTube and on this site.

Why Joomla? (The short version)

The CMS landscape today has four broad camps:

  • Hosted page builders — easy until you outgrow them and find you can't take your site with you.
  • Plugin-driven CMS — friendly, but a real site ends up running 15+ third-party plugins you have to keep alive.
  • Developer-first CMS — powerful, but you need a developer on call for every menu change.
  • Headless CMS — flexible, but you're hand-building a frontend before publishing a paragraph.

Joomla sits in the professional middle ground. Site-owner friendly without being dumbed down. Batteries-included without plugin sprawl. Fully self-hosted and yours forever. Granular permissions, multilingual content, custom fields, content versioning, a native REST API, and a strong security record — all in core, all free, all open source.

That's our pitch. Come to a meetup and we'll show you the receipts.

Who Houston JUG is for

  • Site owners tired of plugin-stack maintenance and ongoing license fees
  • Freelancers and small agencies evaluating CMS options to recommend to clients
  • Long-time Joomla users who want to go deeper on features they haven't fully explored
  • Developers curious about headless CMS, REST APIs, AI integrations, and modern Joomla architecture
  • People shopping for a CMS that won't trap them in a vendor's box
  • Anyone who's been told "just use [other CMS]" and wants to see what else is out there

You don't need to be in Houston, Texas, or even the United States. The meetups run on Google Meet at noon Central — early afternoon for most of North America, evening for Europe, morning for Asia-Pacific. Recordings and recap articles cover anyone who can't make it live.

What you'll get from us

If you subscribe, you'll receive:

  • A reminder email the day before each monthly meetup, with the Google Meet link
  • The session recording within 48 hours, with chapter markers
  • A written recap of each meetup with key takeaways and links
  • Notifications when our schedule shifts (life happens, dates move)
  • An open inbox for your Joomla questions — we'll answer or point you somewhere good
  • Zero spam. We don't sell our subscriber list. Ever.

What we ask of you (nothing, but if you're so inclined…)

  • Show up — virtually, when you can. The community grows when you're in the room.
  • Share a recording, a tutorial, or this site with one other person who'd benefit.
  • Ask questions — they make the meetups better, and other attendees usually have the same question.
  • Volunteer to present a 5-minute member showcase down the road. We do an annual showcase session and we'd love to feature your work.
  • Tell us what you want — topics, formats, frequency. We're shaping this around the community, not the other way around.

Sponsored by INFINI Marketing

Houston JUG is proudly sponsored by INFINI Marketing, a Houston-based digital agency that's been building and supporting Joomla sites for over a decade. INFINI covers our domain registration, hosting space, and the engineering time it takes to keep this site running. Without their support, this group wouldn't exist.

We mention them up front for two reasons:

  • Transparency. You should know who pays the bills here.
  • Honest recommendation. When members ask "I need help with my Joomla site" or "I need a new website built — who do you trust?" — our honest answer is INFINI Marketing. They've been deep in the Joomla ecosystem for years, they actually know the platform, and they work with clients locally in Houston as well as remotely across the U.S. and beyond.

Need professional help with a Joomla site?

The meetups, recordings, articles, and extensions guide are designed to help you do it yourself. But sometimes you need someone to just handle it — a fresh build, a migration, a stuck project, ongoing maintenance, or a custom feature.

For that, we recommend reaching out directly to INFINI Marketing. Tell them Houston JUG sent you. Whether you're in Houston, anywhere in the U.S., or working remotely from somewhere else entirely, they'll either help you or point you toward someone who can.

What we're not

  • A platform-war forum. Other CMS exist. They have their use cases. We're focused on Joomla — what it does well, where it shines, how to get the most from it.
  • Officially endorsed by Joomla.org. We're an independent volunteer group, part of the broader Joomla community but not a corporate entity.
  • Just for Houston-area folks. The "Houston" in our name is a flag, not a fence. The meetups are virtual and the doors are open to anyone, anywhere — Texas, the U.S., or any time zone willing to dial in.
  • An affiliate marketing site. We don't get referral fees from the extensions we recommend, we don't run paid placements, and we don't sell training. Our sponsor relationship with INFINI Marketing is the one commercial connection on this site, and we tell you about it openly.

Get in touch

The fastest way to plug into Houston JUG is to subscribe at jughouston.com. You'll get the meetup link before each session, the recordings afterward, and the occasional update when something good lands.

If you have a question about Joomla, want to suggest a topic, want to present at a future session, or just want to say hi — drop us a note via the Connect page. We read everything, and we usually answer within a day or two.

If you need professional services for a Joomla site, reach out directly to INFINI Marketing.

Resources you might want

Welcome to the group. Let's build something good together.