Pizza, Rome and Fun

Written by willebil

Sunday, 20 January 2008

Two weeks ago I received an invitation for the Joomla!day in Rome and I gladly accepted. The Joomla!day in Rome was the first Joomla!day to be held in Italy and when I arrived on Friday evening Alex Red - one of the organizers - showed me around, and I was impressed on the work that was put into the preparations of this Joomla!day. When Alex showed me the conference room I was overwhelmed…500 seats (!) and Alex told me they expected to have a full house on Saturday! Quite impressive for a first Joomla!day.

On the Saturday the Joomla!day started around nine o'clock in the morning. I could follow parts of the sessions because my Italian still needs a lot of improvement The program was solid and very interesting. Topics handled where: Virtuemart, Joomla! Hosting, JoomFish, Search Engine optimalisation, a demo on the migration of Joomla! 1.0 to 1.5 (done by Gianmarco Odorizzi who is 15 years old!), a presentation on the open source web-tv solution that was used to show a live video feed. Around 4 pm I gave my presentation entitled "All together". You can find a copy of the presentation on slideshare.

I explained how the Joomla! Project is organized and talked about community involvement. "I want to help out, but I don't know how?" is a question I receive a lot, and the answer is "No matter what you can do, you can get involved in many ways". Just an example: If you can spare an hour per week to help answering questions on the forum, you are already helping out. When you take this example, and everyone who is registered does this, we will have 160.000 hours per week that are being spend to the project
For those who are really motivated and want to get more involved to the project, we have the working groups you could consider joining. This weekend the documentation event was started, and along with the bug squashing event we try to create new possibilities for people to contribute back to the program. Along with programs as the Google Summer of Code and the Google Highly Open Participation contest we really try to offer everyone the opportunity to get involved.

Another main topic I handled during my presentation are the branches we currently have. Of course I have briefly talked about the future versions of Joomla! I explained we keep on actively support the Joomla! 1.0.x branch, and Joomla! 1.5 will be supported until we release Joomla! 1.6. The newly created bug squad is now organizing itself to offer the best support we can give to both branches. This will be a challenge for sure, because we never had the situation that we needed to support two mainstream branches within the project. It is because of this that we are actively seeking for new people who are willing to help out in the project...the project still grows in an amazing tempo, and to keep up with that we need you!

The welcome I received in Rome was breathtaking, next time I hope to have some time to visit this great city. I really want to thank the organizing team for inviting me to this Joomla!day and all the people who have visited this events to make it the success it is!

Read original post at source site... http://www.joomla.org/component/option,com_jd-wp/Itemid,105/p,472/.

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