JoomlaDays 2011 Netherlands - Day 1

April 2nd, 2011 at 8:39 PM CEST in Events

Today was the first day of the JoomlaDays 2011 in the Netherlands. What follows is a short report of the presentation that was given by ThemePartner, presentations that were visited, and the first day of the event in general.

Joomla 1.6 by Brian Teeman

In this presentation, Brian has shed a light on the key features that come with the Joomla 1.6 release. He highlighted features such as the vastly improved ACL (Access Control List) management, where you can give or deny users (correction, groups which contain users) access to certain parts or actions of the website. Added to his previous Joomla secrets (which have mostly been removed in Joomla 1.6), he noted that there is a plugin available which you can use to expand the user registration with fields such as 'address' and 'postal code'. A very handy alternative to components such as Community Builder if you just want to ask a couple more questions rather than build an entire community on your website.

CSS Techniques Explained by Robin Poort

The 'Beukenzaal' room was packed for this presentation by ThemePartner member Robin Poort. Over 85 people (a record for day one!) have attended this presentation in which Robin explained in a high tempo the ins and outs of CSS styling for Joomla. By using a series of examples (including how to build a suckerfish menu for Joomla, on which a separate blog will be published later) he showed that many of the CSS code that is commonly used to style websites is either superfluous or inefficient.

Lunch

A complimentary lunch is included in the ticket price for the Joomladays. Having set the bar high last year, nothing more than a great lunch was expected this year. The Joomladays team (and of course the people of the venue at which the conference is held: Kaap Doorn) have done an amazing job on the lunch buffet that was arranged for us between the presentations. Added to the good food and drinks were a sunny sky, 24 degrees Celsius and lively discussions on the presentations that were held and Joomla in general.

ACL in Joomla 1.6 by Sander Potjer

Next up was an outstanding presentation by event host Sander Potjer. In the presentation he explained in great detail how to use the ACL function that is new in Joomla 1.6. By setting the permissions down from 'Global Configuration' to a single article you can prevent or allow users in specific groups to perform actions such as logging in to the Administrator or deleting certain articles. What he also explained was that custom ACL settings required great planning and takes time to keep all settings correct, even when new roles or new categories are added. Lastly he showed us the ACL manager he is working on for Joomla 1.6 which he claimed should be released in the near future.

Joomla 1.7/1.8/1.x by Hannes Papenberg

Hannes - equiped with his stylish headset - delivered a presentation on the future of Joomla! He posed questions such as the direction which Joomla should take (end user / developer, framework / CMS) and discussed arguments for either one of them. Ending his presentation he allowed the audience to interact with each other on what they thought was the direction that Joomla should be heading in. Unfortunately, neither in this, nor in any other presentation a guarantee of any kind could be giving that Joomla 1.7 would feature full backwards compatibility with Joomla 1.6. On the bright side though, it seems that most of the developers (at least of those who were present) agree that backwards compatibility is an important issue for Joomla 1.7 and should be an important goal for this future release.

Molajo - Babs Gösgens

In this interactive presentation (held in English just for Hannes), Babs explained us about the Joomla distribution Molajo (which is an anagram for Joomla, and as Babs stated about 5 times, explicitly not a fork of Joomla). In Molajo - which is headed by a counsel of elders that are mostly Dutch and apparently easy to bribe using beers as Johan Janssen told us - there have been several improvements to the Joomla core. For example: Molajo features a restyled and simpler backend and has the Construct framework included. Unfortunately the preview that was promised in the talk didn't make it to the final presentation, because I'd liked to see this new distribution in action!

User Groups by Sander Potjer

Sander told us in the short talk about the various Joomla! user groups that are present in the Netherlands and Belgium. He also presented several arguments why visitors of the Joomla days should visit those user group meetings and how both you and the community would  benefit from that.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Joomla by Brian Teeman

In this fun and lively presentation by Brian Teeman, he told us about the seven sins (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony) and how Joomla users commit those sins. Before presenting those sins, Brian showed us a nice star-wars-like-scroll on the future of Joomla, which got him a great applause at the end. A great presentation which I'm sure he'll be giving at other venues later, try to catch it if you can!

Ask the Panel

The panel containing Peter Martin, Marijke Stuivenberg, Hannes Papenberg, Nicholas Dionysopoulos and Johan Jansen tried to answer various questions ranging from the best photoalbum extension available to tougher issues such as the backwards compatibility of Joomla 1.7. The most important thing we've learned here is that Johan Jansen can code anything for you in under an hour (as long as you give him beer), a valuable lesson I might say.

Drinks

After the final session it was off to the terrace to grab some (free!) beers and discuss the happenings of the day.

Don't forget to visit my presentation 'SEO myths busted' at 10.45 in the Beukenzaal tomorrow!