At J and Beyond, there was a so-called 'lightning sessions'. During these sessions, people had the opportunity to talk briefly about something they're working on. Or something they've experienced. Or something they feel strongly about.
Basically, the lightning session was an opportunity for people to shed some light on things that the audience might not have heard about before.
One lightning session that stood out to me was the one from Jisse Reitsma. He told about going to India to teach Joomla as volunteer work. This sounded interesting, and after the session I asked Jisse to tell more about his experience. The result was this video.
JoomlaWorks just released version 2.3 of their free CCK component for Joomla: K2.
The new version has a large number of new features. K2 extends the functions of the Joomla! core and makes it easier to submit and manage large content driven sites. Additionally, it makes it easy to manage users and give access to certain content items. You can also create custom content templates for the purpose of blogs, catalogs, news sites and much more.
Another great feature of this release is the improved SEO functions: K2 will now auto-append the first 150 characters of the item's text onto the "description" meta tag, if none is specified. It will also use any tags added for the "keyword" meta tag.
In this post, Fotis Evangelou and Lefteris Kavadas speak about the new version of K2.
Read on to see the video interview
There has been many efforts going lately to encourage people to contribute to the Joomla! project in various ways.
From the Joomla! Forward initiative and the alltogetherasawhole.org website, to lots of blog posts both on the joomla.org site and elsewhere.
Jeremy Wilken of Gnomeoftherun.com is one person with a strong opinion in this matter. I met up with him during the J and Beyond conference to hear what he had to say about contributing to the Joomla! project.
In this video interview Jeremy shares his thoughts on how you can contribute to Joomla! for our common benefit.
As you know, I spent 4 days in Germany to attend the Joomla! conference «J and Beyond 2010». I had a great time! And it seems a lot of other people did, too.
I've put together a video with some attendees sharing their view on the conference.
The keynote at J and Beyond 2010 on Monday morning was done by Ryan Ozimek.
In the keynote he talked about the role of the OSM (Open Source Matters), board in the Joomla! project. He emphasized that the role of OSM should be to support the community.
After the keynote I had a short chat with Ryan.
You can see the video of the talk in this post.
The Joomla! Forward is a community initative to move the development of Joomla forward. The initiative was started by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos.
Yesterday, I had a chat with Nicholas, as well as Michel van Agtmaal about the Joomla! Forward initiative when I met them at the J and Beyond conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.
Today, the J!Oscars, or the first ever global «Joomla Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition» awards were held held at the J! and Beyond conference in Wiesbaden, Germany.
The event was led by Brian Teeman and Johan Janssens, both co-founders of Joomla!. Brian actually planned to have a Eurovision Song Contest-like voting process. But as there are 27 countries represented here at the moment, it would last all night (just as the ESC) ;)
To the cheers from the crowd, the winners were announced one after eachother. Johan picked one representative from each country to present the awards, which I found was a nice touch.
I'm here at the J and Beyond conference in Wiesbaden, Germany. Among the people I've met at the conference are the people behind the Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URL extension sh404SEF.
I met with lead developer Yannick Gaultier and CEO Victor Drover of Anything Digital for a chat about the upcoming version of sh404SEF. Yannick is based in France and Victor is in the U.S. They started working together last year after Yannick almost quit the project due to his day-time job. Yannick has now quit his day-job to work full time as a developer with Anything Digital.
J! and Beyond is the first international event for Joomla! addicts. 187 people from 25 countries across 5 continents have gathered in Wiesbaden to live and breathe Joomla! for 72 hours (and add some).
As I'm finally here, it's almost surreal. I've «met» a lot of the attendees before - but only virtually. To meet these people in real life is a really nice experience. It's like coming home, really. It's like coming to a place you've never been before, yet the people there are like your neighbours. It's a very nice feeling indeed.
Last night, I met Rafael from Dioscouri, Joe leBlanc, Brian Teeman, Fotis Evangelou from JoomlaWorks, Nicholas Dionysopoulos, Thoma Kahl and Sören Eberhardt-Biermann from Virtuemart, Chris Davenport from the documentations team, Yannick Gaultier and Victor Drover from Anything Digital (sh404SEF) and a lot of other people from the community. We had some beers at a place in downtown - oh, the German beer is nice!
It's one thing chatting with people online, but it's when you meet face to face that you teally see the person behind the name. And, I think I need to change my profile picture. Everyone was telling me I looked very different in person. I'll take that as a positive :)
Now I have just registered and try to figure out who everyone is :)
I will report back to you all throughout the conference, so stay tuned for more.