Brian Teeman

Whilst I was travelling home from Joomla!Day Germany I started thinking about how long it was taking me and was the journey worthwhile. The answer was "not that long" and "yes definitely".

Then I started wondering if my journey was amongst the longest and I quickly realised that because I was flying and others even inside Germany were driving then it wasn't.

Can you tell where I'm going with this?

I've just returned from a very successful Joomla!Day in Germany and had an amzing time.

I will be blogging more about the event and my experience in Germany in the next few days but before I do I should explain what a Joomla!Day is.

A Joomla!Day is something fairly unique to Joomla. Other Open Source projects have global conferences or organise gatherings around generic Open Source events such as LinuxTag. Joomla!Day is different as it is organised on a National or Regional basis.

Joomla!Day is something very close to my heart. I spoke at perhaps the first large gathering in what was then the Mambo Community in Bangkok and a few months later spoke at the first "MamboDay" event in Bonn, Germany, I then organised one of the very first Joomla!Days, in Leeds, UK.

Some of you may know that I am Jewish and that I have built many web sites for Jewish communities, charities and youth clubs here in the UK.

As in many small communities there is an element of "they have a new web site, why don't we?"

Now I might have claimed to have built many of these Jewish web sites but it's amazing how many are now using Joomla.

I even heard one Rabbi referring it to "Jewmla" assuming that it was software specificaly written for synagogues.

This is a question that I've pondered for a long time and this is about the fourth time I have sat down to write.

Joomla is rightly very proud of the number of languages that it is available in, there cannot be many Open source projects that offer the same range, almost 60 at the last count.

Yet joomla.org is exclusively in English.

Exactly four years ago, on the 16th September 2005, Joomla 1.0 was released.

Happy Birthday!!

Have a slice of cake!!

A few weeks ago I wrote that Joomla and Virtuemart were not the ideal solution for creating an ecommerce website. (Read it here).

Feedback on that was fairly divided and it was suggested that "my" problem was that I didn't really know Virtuemart well enough.

So, never one to turn down the opportunity to learn from the source I decided to go to Virtuemart Day and JoomlaDay in Germany later this month.

Today only the cost of Virtuemart Day is reduced to only €99.

I live in Yorkshire or "God's own country", as we call it in the North of England and we do things differently here "oop north".

Images projected on a screen
Step into an artificial dream
Programme all the things you want to feel
Make a world where fantasies are real

Stand back and let the future unfurl
We'll all be living in a virtual world
In a virtual world
Ah-ah, in a virtual world

13 June 2009 I will be revealing the "hidden secrets of joomla" at Joomla!days.nl.

What will I be saying?

What won't I be saying?

Is any topic taboo?

If you want to find out you had better make sure you are there nice and early!

It's been a while since I attended an official JoomlaDay event so I'm pretty excited about the upcoming event in the Netherlands.

If you've never attended a JoomlaDay it's definitely worth your while. Learn from the experts, share your experience and best of all meet up with all the people you only know online.

The joomladay team have put together a very full programme of speakers and training sessions so there is bound to be something for everyone.

Of course there are many speakers that I look forward to hearing but I'm sure the highlight sessions of this 2 day event will be "The Hidden Secrets of Joomla" and "GASPED - a web development principle".

(Hint those are the two sessions that I will be presenting - and I said I was modest - hehe)