Joomla Day UK 2010 Summary

And so to the end of a terrific weekend at the Joomla Day UK 2010 event at Trinity Park, Suffolk. Aside from the ‘converted barn’ feel of the venue, where natural light flooded the venue and you could actually see grass (grass!) – there was plenty of discussion around the upcoming release of Joomla 1.6, how to improve community engagement and broad questions around the open source model and its operating model. While there was some banter about the ‘Microsoft guy’ in the room, it was great to see openness to the discussions.

Day 1

We kicked off with a keynote from Chris Adams from Rochen – who outlined the approach his hosting company had taken to Joomla, a good grounding in the fundamentals of how folks should think about the foundations of their web sites. Especially interesting was the frequency with which holsters and webmasters overlook the physical security of their sites. There is an offline component to the web – and it sometimes needs a padlock!

We then moved to breakout sessions: Ryan Ozimek brought the American approach to inject some energy to the room for the Joomla 1.6 and the future session. Ryan touched on the high level thinking around how to shepherd open source projects forward and the role of OSM (Open Source Matters) in assisting Joomla reach their full potential. Ian Wright took us through SVN releases, based on his pretty severe experiences in sites going down and how to manage. After some pressing questions earlier in the day Ian’s promised to do an interview for UBelly around his thoughts on how the Joomla community can be set up better for revenue opportunities. We’ve also agreed to provide our take on how Microsoft can contribute to the open source community, which we’ll post when it’s done.

Ruth Cheesley provided an interactive intro to Joomla for beginners, a great way of funnelling from the download process to implementation to ongoing management. I’ve asked to get some setup tutorials from Ruth to post on UBelly so watch this space…We shifted gears to Access Control Levels with Sander Potjer, delving into the nuts and bolts of how to manage access and permissions across the site.To close, we had a small hands-on session with Chris Davenport who answered questions on template issues the audience had been having. Chris is the documentation lead so there wasn’t anyone better placed to help. With that the day was wrapped and we headed off into the sunset! (or pub, depending on your desire to sample the famous Ipswich nightlife).

Day 2

Even with the assistance of an extra hour in bed there a few sore heads were present in the morning; apparently there was a great view of some arrests through the corner of a chip shop at 3am. A real shame I missed that one.

Ruth kicked off with her best hostess impression then we launched straight into Nick A (Community Builder)’s keynote – a very challenging session to the leadership team on how to introduce professionalism to the Joomla effort, a model for making money off the platform, and raising the question of whether there should be any full-time, paid staff rather than depending on volunteers to train newcomers. A good discussion in the room of where the Joomla could go.

I was intrigued by Nick’s take so attending his next session – building community portals – bypassing a kind free coffee offer from Chris Williams. As there was free coffee in the lobby I felt stupid for missing the incentive.

We then moved to my favourite part of the entire event: Ryan Ozimek’s keynote. I was honoured to have briefly kicked off Ryan’s session, and I’ll restate the points I made; First off, that Joomla works great on Windows and we’re delighted to be a partner, and sponsor. Second, thanks for all the feedback on where we’re doing well and could be doing more in the Joomla community. And finally – our thanks to Ryan for being an advocate of Microsoft in the open source space, and touching on the JCA agreement that was signed earlier this year. Ryan walked us through this background, how he came to Joomla and his views on the future. Despite showing a huge pic of Steve Jobs with an iPhone (we’ll see when he gets his Windows Phone 7 device) it was nice to see opportunities OSM sees not just with Microsoft, but with eBay and potentially more commercial partners. (By the way, if you attended and received one of our UBelly cards – we expect to see you as friends!) After that we moved to Search Engine Optimisation with Ruth where the importance of site discoverability was covered and best practices were covered.

Ending

Kudos to the organising team on sorting a great venue, eye-opening sessions, and knowledgeable speakers from across the globe. Microsoft was delighted to be a sponsor. We look forward to following up on some of the potential projects that were discussed and hope to be invited to future events. If nothing else, we have t-shirts that talk about being turned on. (IE9…)

To learn more about Microsoft and Joomla click here.