Joomla! Day Vancouver – recap

I’m very happy to announce that the Vancouver Joomla Day event was well attended with over 120 people eager to learn about Joomla CMS.

Registration started at 9:00am. Attendees were given a raffle ticket, t-shirt (for those who RSVP'd in time) and Joomla Day name tag. What a friendly bunch. I got to meet each of them as I assisted Wendy (main organizer) with the registration process.

Coffee, tea muffins and cookies were in abundance thanks to Bread Garden, who also catered lunch with yummy wraps and subs.

Rastin Mehr of rmdStudio.com opened the event at 9:30am, with Brad Baker (Joomla Core Team Member) on his heels giving a Joomla Project Overview – which I unfortunately missed.

Next Toni Marie Swats (Joomla Forum Workgroup) from MyDynamicSite.com shared on Building your Joomla Design House stating that while the Joomla CMS is free to use, we can generate income through template design and by the addition of plugins and extensions.

Later on in the day Steve Burge (OS Training) shared 2 SEO tools that every Joomla website should use... that being sh404SEF, and JoomlaSEF, giving the user control of urls and title tags to assist with better site ranking.

Other topics covered were security, hosting and performance. As it turns out, Joomla CMS is very secure. What does compromise a Joomla's site's security is often the extensions that are installed, so make sure you know for a fact that the extensions you use are created by reputable developers.

Door prized were drawn between speakers. I had my eye on the Joomla 1.5 Template design book but as a sponsor, I was not eligible for the draw. Thankfully a friend & colleague Simon won the book and is going to lend it to me once he's done reading it.

More Joomla Day Vancouver recaps

• Presentations: Live blogging was done by Raul who has a nice summary of several of the presentations (search term: Joomla)
• Publicity: Bruce Byfield offers a Joomla! Day summary on Linux.com
• Photos: Rastin, has a whole whack of pictures from the event (image above taken by Rastin) – check them out.

In closing, the level of participation during Q & A was fantastic, with many people more informed about Joomla at the end of the day, than when they arrived.

Thank you!

A HUGE thank you goes out to Wendy Robinson who spear-headed this event. It would not have happened without you. Thank you also to all the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and media sponsors. Who knew that Joomla CMS was this popular in Vancouver?!