A hardy “Joomie” crowd gathered this past Saturday March 16th at the Microsoft NERD center for the first ever Joomla Day Boston event http://joomladayboston.com. Considering all of the other activities surrounding St. Patricks’ day the turnout was quite good and there were some great new faces on the scene. Kudo’s to Dianne Henning and the many others that contributed to making this a super fun, well organized and informative event.
CNP Integrations was a sponsor of this event and I had the privilege to present seven pillars of success for building websites that connect with communities. Whether you have been around Joomla for a long time like I have or a newbie you always learn something interesting and make new friends. For us that work online most of our days it is nice when some of the folks you interact with online show up so you can put a face and personality with the often numerous chat conversations you have while mingling around the Joomla ecosystem.
We saw a lot of new faces to the community and even brought a couple folks from our team that have been old hands at working with Joomla but not yet had a chance to get to a Joomla Day event. An exciting part for me at these events is not only to see the diversity of the participants but once folks come to a Joomla event they cannot help but to get energized and interested in finding out how they can get more involved in the Joomla Community itself.
If you want to get more involved, there is a new community outreach initiative with the addition of David Hurley from the PLT and a new role created for Dianne Henning with the OSM. David has been campaigning at all of the Joomla Day events so far this year and moving forward they will now be collaborating on getting the Joomla message out and inspiring new folks to get involved in the community. For more info contact David: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The highlight for me at the Boston Joomla Day was Paul D. Parisi’s presentation on site performance optimization. He is starting a new business around this service model and he had some great ideas and experience to share; http://www.saviorlabs.com. With the ever changing technology and platforms/frameworks they are built on there is a big need in my opinion for services targeted at performance optimization. I also liked Elin’s presentation about some of the great new features in Joomla 3.0 and the upcoming release of J3.1 (March 26th). I for one am looking forward to using the new Tags feature since this will provide a whole new dimension for organizing content and easily searching for it.
Paul Orwig gave the keynote and though his simple PowerPoint was derailed by technical difficulties in the beginning the proverb takeaway he left us with has really stuck form me. It is something we “Joomies” need to always keep in mind whether we are a team of one or a team of many. “If we want to go fast we go it alone but if we want to go far we go together” I am paraphrasing but this concept sets the stage for us to be thinking of the greatness we can achieve pooling our talents in a common direction. There are infinite possibilities ahead if we can keep enthusiastic, pitch in where we can, invite others to get involved and continue to make being part of the community a rewarding and fun experience for everyone.
We hope to see you all and the next Joomla Day events coming up. Stay tuned to the Joomla Event Page for more info. http://events.joomla.org/all-events/21-joomla-days.html
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