Once a year JandBeyond, the international Joomla conference is held in Europe. This time, the venue was, again, the Dolce Hotel in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Elvis Presley lived in Bad Nauheim during his time with the United States Army in Friedberg.
My initial plan was to meet with Christine (my beloved wife :) ) at JandBeyond, attend the event and drive home together with her. The days before she was in Germany and I was in Switzerland. She prepared the session “Peace, Love and Leadership” and worked the weeks before the event together with the responsible working group on a Proposal for a new Joomla project structure (Discuss the proposal here). She was asked to attend the leadership meeting after the event. Unfortunately it was not possible for her to attend because of some trouble making a decision on behalf of the leadership team so she finally quit her participation.
If you attended jab12 too, please be so kind and add your preferred social media accounts in this Google doc and please post your links to photos in this Google doc.
And now – my story :)
I arrived Friday morning and as part of the video team I had to record sessions.
Day1
Occupy Joomla! – Jeremy Wilken (description)
It was a great presentation on how we can regain our project! Jeremy was/is part of the working group that created the proposal for a new Joomla structure and I was very curious to hear his thoughts.
It is time for us to regain our project. Joomla is at the mercy of those who are willing to take the initiative to make the change. However I think we are tired of hearing the mantra ‘If you want it, contribute’. We need more than words, we need inspiration and direction. Occupy Joomla is just that, taking control of Joomla through more effective processes, unconventional methods, and overwhelming passion. This session will explore some of the ways we can take control, and make Joomla our project.
If you attend JAB, then you are part of the 1{0f2b36d8f80fa52f37b916148a6e37fe671d96583f68d5887344addd2eee52a6} that cares about Joomla so strongly they would stake their livelihood upon it. It is the right, and perhaps the responsibility, for us to improve and maintain Joomla. However barriers exist, communication breaks down, visions are lacking, and we face other challenges that keep us from the goal. We will explore new methods or tactics that can help re-energize the community and revive the CMS as a platform for innovation and collaboration.
Hashtag is #occupyjoomla
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
Making Joomla profitable – Pedro Francisco Vidal Lopez (description)
Pedro has been talking about his experiences since the time of JoomlaDay Madrid in 2008 and about the work of the Spanish association OSIberia (Website, Twitter). For me it was interesting to hear some insights about the Spanish community and the ways for companies that use Joomla to earn money. Pedro has a good approach to mention at any time “And now listen and repeat: I AM JOOMLA!”. At the first look it sounds a bit like in a church but I like the idea. The Joomla! project is a combination of all individuals behind the project and he is right: everyone is Joomla! See the smiling faces :) Only if YOU rock JOOMLA rocks too!
Joomla 3.0 UX – Kyle Ledbetter (description)
Kyle gave an overview on Twitter Bootstrap in Joomla. Bootstrap is a “Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions”. The weeks before the event I noticed a huge discussion in the Joomla UX forum concerning that topic. It is useful to read the whole thread to get an idea how difficult these decision processes were. A week ago, the Joomla leadership team decided to use Twitter Bootstrap in the upcoming Joomla 3.x series. Here is a kind of preview.
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Where is Joomla going and how do we get there? – Andrea Tarr, Mark Dexter (description)
Andrea Tarr (@tarrconsulting) and Mark Dexter (no Twitter) presented an overview on the upcoming changes in Joomla 3.x and 4.x series. A very interesting point for me was when Mark said that Joomla has no Core Developers anymore. Another point was that Joomla Platform version 12.2 will be the base of Joomla 3.x. I would be happy to see a central roadmap page somewhere on Joomla.org – may be it exists and I just don’t know :) (please provide a link in a comment if you know more). Another point is a bit unclear to me is: Since the Joomla CMS is not anymore the core product of the project, where can I find the roadmap and general strategy of the the Joomla platform? I learned that seven working groups were formed to discuss topics like this.
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Roadmap Lightning talks
All working groups will have the opportunity to give a 4-minute lightning talk to describe what they are about, to drum up some enthusiasm and maybe recruit new volunteers, and for those more established groups to talk about the work they have done. But even if there is no working group, if you are interested in giving a talk, please give us a summary of what you want to talk about. (You can do that when you fill out the form mentioned in the next paragraph.)
It was amazing to see a lot of good ideas. During jab12, most of these working groups offered a session on what is planned and how to contribute. Unfortunately it was not possible for me to attend these sessions and I am really curious to read something about the plans, the outcomes, and of course, I would love to have an aggregated roadmap!
Blogging with Joomla – past, present and future – Kristoffer Sandven (description)
Kristoffer runs the famous JoomlaBlogger Blog and gave insights about his work and his webiste. During jab12 he wrote blogposts about the event.
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Joomla in Mongolia:: Our story and lessons learnt – Altansukh Tumenjargal (description)
Altansukh Tumenjargal talked about the success story of Joomla! in Mongolia. David Jardin, Thomas Kahl and Stefan Wendhausen, who are organizing the German JoomlaDay decided to support the JoomlaDay Mongolia this year. They asked me whether I want to join the team and travel to Mongolia. I will join them :)
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
Meet the Leadership Team
It was nice to see most of the members of the leadership team trying to answer some serious questions (I’m sure there will be a blog entry with a summary about this session written by the leadership team :) ).
This is the Facebook version of the photo with all the usernames.
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Video
A cool Joomla video was shown on the big screen made by joomlaproffs.se.
Barbecue in the evening
In the evening, we had a wonderful barbecue (I think it was sponsored by Ebay … thanks a lot guys, it was delicious) with a lot of German sausages and beer, a JoomStew podcast was recorded and I talked to so many interesting people :)
Day 2
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Michel van Agtmaal (description)
Michel will suggest several new JED policies and processes in an effort to help the community decide if and how to get rid of The Bad and The Ugly extensions from the JED.
He did it and it was great. In the evening he was chosen to present the JOSCARS because of his sexy slides :)
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
A different approach to Joomla! Documentation – Tony Davis, Jon Neubauer (description)
Tony and Jon worked in the last months on a fresh concept for the documention wiki. They proposed to switch it to Joomla, provided it in several languages and use a versioning system.
As a first little result of this talk, I added links to all the freely available PDFs of the Joomla! 2.5 – Beginner’s Guide provided by cocoate to the Getting Started with Joomla page of the wiki.
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
How to organize a Joomla!Day and / or Joomla User Group (JUG)
This was a good discussion between organizers of Joomla! Days all around the world. At the image you see Mu’uz Asfaw from Ethiopia. He is trying to organize the first Joomla! Day in Ethiopia this year.
After tweeting that you get 1,000 US$ for the first JoomlaDay in a country (please retweet), I met Panayiotis Halouvas from Cyprus and talked to him. If things goes well, he will organize the first JoomlaDay in Cyprus this year. This would be great!
Joomla Adoption in Large Corporations – Oliver Ratzesberger (description)
Oliver talked about BigData and Analytics as a Service. Honestly, I didn’t get the “real message” of this talk :(.
He worked for Ebay and was “the” guy who introduced Joomla as base for their analytics and he was the manager of this department too. As far as I understood he hired Andrew Eddie, Louis Landry, Rob Schley and Kyle Ledbetter (don’t know exactly whether he hired them, but during his time at Ebay they started their work there). Today he is working for Sears and Ebay is contributing code to Joomla. Which is in total a good result of his work!
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
Beyond being responsive – Seth Warburton (description)
Getting back to our roots!
was the message of this talk and it was simply great!
Look at this posh room :)
Slides:
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
JGardens, Joomla Site Builder – Part Lawate (description)
Based on the Drupal Gardens concept, we plan to bring this to Joomla. With a Rich wizard interface that lets users chose the features they need & the look & feel they want, we are looking at taking Joomla to the masses with this application.
Great idea and looks good. Hopefully we’ll see something like this very soon.
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
How to stay in contact with your websites using JMonitoring ? – Pierre Andre Vullioud (description)
Unfortunately, I was too late in this presentation: I only realized that I might have missed something very good :(
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
J.O.S.C.A.R. Awards
Well, no comment :)
This is Brian
This is Victor
This is the Jury
This is the Audience
Please add yourself in the Facebook version of that photo
And the winners are …
- Free Joomla Add-ons – Cost-free extensions or tools, excluding templates: JCE
- Commercial Joomla Add-ons – Paid extensions or tools, excluding templates: ACL Manager
- Joomla Template Systems: Free or commercial template frameworks or boiler-plates: Beez
- Joomla Services – Joomla-specific services such as hosting, training, support, contracting, etc…: CloudAccess.net
- Corporate Web Sites – Web sites built for the corporate sector: stackideas.com
- Non-corporate Web Sites Web sites built for the non-corporate sector such as NGOs, non-profits and Government: joomlagov.info
- eCommerce Web Sites – Web sites built for online storefront: www.kaffekapsler.no
- Mobile Web Sites – Web sites built for the mobile web: brian.teeman.net
- Github Junkie – Recognizing core code contributions: Michael Babker
- Communications Junkie: Participation in Joomla chat rooms, blogs and on social media channels – Brian Teeman
- Bug Junkie – Finding and/or fixing bugs on the tracker: Mark Dexter
- Innovation of the Year: Joomla Platform
- Personal Contribution: Ryan Ozimek
Evening
Burgers in the pub with many French people (Valéry Isaksen, Yann Gomiero, Thierry Jirkowsky , and 3 other Frenchman (TO DO add the names)). Afterwards we ended up in the Dolce pub where a football match was presented at the TV screens, the UK team (Chelsea) won – congrats :) and Angie Radtke provided free German beer at the terrace :). I talked to Grace Francisco and we discovered that she knows and worked together with my daughter Isabell at DrupalCon Copenhagen. The world is a small place :)
Day 3
Joomla in 2102 – Brian Teeman (description)
Brian says “Predicting the future is notoriously difficult … ” and he is right :). I liked his presentation.
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Responsive Design and it’s benefit – Paulo Griiettner (description)
The world are going more and more mobile… so… why isn’t your website too?
Paulo did an amazing presentation about the techniques of responsive website. He showed a lot of useful code and the audience was very happy.
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
Mobilizing Joomla! – What We Have Learnt in 5 Years, and What to Expect in the Next 5 – Ugur Kaner (description)
Ugur talked about five years history of designing mobile websites and he convinced me to start selling the epub versions of my books in a very easy way in the future (will hopefully start soon with the easy part :) )
What I learned, responsive design is important but it is not the only thin that counts in the mobile world!
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Lightning Talks (description)
- Square One CMS
- Community Builder 2.0: Using a new way to build web apps
- Choo – Association management system
- BabDev Library
- EDUNIGERIA
- Inspiring young people in Open Source Technologies
- Semantic HTML5 for Joomla 2.5 via modules.php
- Drupal to Joomla! Migrations – Truthout.org
I try to collect the information and slides in the next days … please help me by adding comments
I like lightning talks and I decided to give my own little lightning talk about my book project (has anyone of photo?). At last years jab I was looking for sponsors for a Joomla! 1.7 book and today more than 333,333 pdf (of all PDFs) were downloaded for free. The actual Joomla! 2.5 book is now available in several languages. Thanks to the help of many translators. Have a look at the download figures :)
TO DO – SLIDES – VIDEOLINK
Joomla! websites on Mobile Devices – Achim Fischer (description)
Achim Fischers session was the last session I attended. Next week, I will travel together with him to the first Chinese JoomlaDay in Shanghai (TO DO LINK). Achim is a true developer and likes the Android platform. He wrote his own Joomla API component and is developing Android apps. And I like the way he’s working :)
TO DO – VIDEOLINK
Conclusion
From my point of view jab12 was a success! The event was well organized and I met interesting people. I already started a few weeks ago to write a “Going Mobile with Joomla!” (German “Mobile Webseiten mit Joomla!”) book and these guys already sponsored it. Stefan is the first sponsor for the German version.Thanks a lot!
Feel free to join them and sponsor the English and/or the German version! :)
And maybe we’ll get a Greek Translation of the Joomla 2.5 Beginner’s Guide with the help of David Rutter :) And fingers crossed, maybe an Amharic (Ethiopia) and a Mongolian version too!
And You? Please help me to add all the missing links …
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