JandBeyond - around the joomla! world in 72 hours - may 30th to june 1st, wiesbaden, germany

Since the introduction of the 1.5 architecture, Joomla has attracted a different class of extension builders : people with a serious dose of software engineering experience have taken to the framework and have built more powerful extensions, often integrating with Joomla at an intimate plugin-level and extending its functionality in ways noone had dreamed of.

Over the last years, we've been building our own extension to Joomla to use structured content - stuff which does not like being flattened into articles, but which is too complex and cumbersome to create custom code for (been there, did that, which is why we went looking for a new solution). What is structured content ? Think about

• projects in countries to cover working domains and executed by organisations
• classes on certain products in a location and given by oner or more teachers
• products in product families with different part numbers depending on color etc., linked to designers and stores where you van buy them.

Just a few examples, which you may have encountered in a requirements document. Actually, in our view, everything is structured content, which is why we called out baby one|content - everything is content, content is everything.

This talk will cover the functional scope of one|content - from metadata definition, to data integration, to creating structured views, to extending the framework with business logic, search filters, ... and answer questions like

• why we built it the way we did
• why we did not use K2, Nooku framework (yet), ...

Focusing on Joomla is fun - features, extensions, templates, neat tricks, ... but the real deal is building sites for customers. This talk concentrates on how customers look at the stuff you are building - what they are looking for, what they like and dislike, how to go about explaining Joomla's way to structure content.

We will present a number of complex sites : lots of structured content, integrating with external databases, loading existing data into a site, migrating older CMS to Joomla. Each example will provide insight in an important part of building complex sites, from requirements management to a clean, phased project approach, and cover the approaches that can really make a difference between your Jooomla site and your competitor's feeble attempt at throiwing code at the problem.

If you want to learn about

• using structured content next to Joomla content
• integrating your site with a CRM or an email marketing system
• how to import existing CMS data into the Joomla database
• making your customer come back for more, and more, and more ...

this presentation is right for you !

Check out this link for video presentation and slides

Social media is the Internet growing up, and while many have dabbled, many more have dismissed it out-of-hand as a waste of time or a risky endeavour that can expose a brand to negative communications.

Done right, social media can be a goldmine on many levels: new business leads, direct access to industry leaders, quick and easy support and feedback during a site build.

This talk will cover topics including:

• Using Twitter to drive sales and build professional trust.
  - How we turned a question posed by a "Dragon" off Dragon's Den into our biggest piece of work in 2009 within 2 weeks 
• Using Facebook to engage with your community and convert leads.
  - How a competition can boost awareness and sales
• Using YouTube to engage with your site visitors and increase your site's content instantly.
  - How to manage a YouTube channel to keep up with constantly changing trends 
• Linking your Joomla site with all the networks simultaneously to complete the loop.

We propose a talk to discuss the process of conceptualising, building and maintaining theartsdesk.com - a site that is in a state of constant update by the 40+ journalists that maintain it, following their single Joomla tuition session in London, UK.

The site uses K2 to provide advanced tagging, categorisation, comments and more, as well as a selection of some of the best Joomla extensions to enable simple yet robust site management.

The site has won several awards and received glowing reports from the likes of BBC Radio 5, the Telegraph and the Independent newspapers. It was recently discussed in an interview on the Joomla Community site: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1126-theartsdeskcom.html

The site was built by 3B Digital in London, and present at J! and Beyond will be business partners and brothers, Alex and Jack Bremer.

This session will cover the integration between Joomla! and Symfony, to create highly user-friendly backends with the powerful of a RAD framework which add enterprise-driven features to your development and deployment.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the plethora of extensions available for Joomla. Selecting the best extension is thus a challenging and important task, and can dramatically impact the total budget for your project, especially if you custom-code an application unnecessarily.

In this presentation, I’ll talk about resources and techniques you can use to help select and evaluate extensions for your Joomla web site that (i) fit your specific needs and (ii) meet Joomla security standards.

The target audience for this talk are users new to Joomla, integrators without strong programming skills and anyone who has ever just added an extension to their site without properly investigating it.

Background

• How often have you run a training session for Joomla only to see your audience's eyes glaze over?
• Ever had a client say to you - why do I need to learn all this, my site only has 10 pages?
• Ever had a call from a client to say - "I think I just broke my site"?
• Do you spend too much time on supporting existing clients?

To developers and technically minded site administrators Joomla is a piece of cake to administer, and yet for many clients managing the site is overwhelming and confusing.

Introducing JWizard - making Joomla simple for simple sites

The majority of Joomla sites are probably simple 'brochure' sites - some articles showcasing a company and maybe a contact form.  For these sites the backend interface to Joomla is overkill.

JWizard, developed by GWE Systems (the company behind JEvents) and SmartStudios UK (a leading UK e-Marketing and design company), brings a new simplified way to manage Joomla webites. 

Adding a new page with a single article in Joomla

• Login to backend of site
• Create article in article manager - fight through lots of complex parameters that are usually not relevant
• Go to menu manager and create a new menu item -
  
  • find the right menu type
  • select the article
  • fight through lots of complex parameters that are usually not relevant
• Go to module manager and open every single module you want to show (or hide) on this new page and set their display options.  Assuming you can remember which module is displayed on which page.

Adding a new page with a single article with JWizard

• Login to the frontend of the site
• Create a new page - menu and article are created in one step with bare minimum of parameters
• Click 'Visible Modules' icon and select which modules are visible on this page (organised by template position)

If you have lots of small-medium sized clients then JWizard will make it far easier for them to manage their sites freeing you up to do more interesting and better paid work.

Joomla 1.6 includes a completely remodelled access control system.  This system operates at several levels allowing to emulate both simple and complex strategies for both viewing content and managing the permissions to perform various actions.  Andrew Eddie, co-developer of the access control subsystem, will walk you through the different capabilities of the new system and look at strategies to achieve various results.  This session will look at the changes to the user management system (new groups and access levels) that support the access control system, the new core premissions, how the core permissions operate at different levels (globally, in components, in categories and in articles) and how ininheritance works.  This session is important for people that want to take a Joomla 1.6 site beyond the simple but limited access controls currently found in Joomla 1.5.

Please note that this session will be conducted remotely via video from Australia.

Joomla, and Mambo before it, have always included new and exciting features for developers in every major release and Joomla 1.6 is no exception.  Joomla 1.5 brought you a flexibale and extensible framework on which to build powerful extensions.  Now, with the aid of significant community contributions, Joomla 1.6 carries the tradition of adding power and performance to your extensions.

Andrew Eddie, co-developer of many of the new Joomla 1.6 sub-systems, will present and in-depth walkthrough of the new API that will be available to developers.  This will include looking at the design of the access control and category management systems, and how easy it is to integrate extensions with them.  The new form API will give designers incredible freedom with not only their own edit screen, but also allows you to modify those of any other extension.  Andrew will also look at the new consistency of the entire source tree and, in particular, new features available in the MVC architecture to take the hard work out of extension design.  Improvements to the Joomla installer have also been made that will literally blow you away.

This session is a must-see for any budding or experienced Joomla developer.  Please note that this session will be conducted remotely via video from Australia.

Joomla 1.6 includes important new features that will change the way Joomla web sites are managed forever: a completely remodelled access control and category system are among the major new features in Joomla 1.6, followed closely by exciting changes such as template styles, article comments and much more.  Andrew Eddie, long-time contributor to the Joomla project, will present a summary and walk-through of the new and revised features in Joomla 1.6 that are important for Joomla web site administrators to be aware of.

Please note, this session will be conducted remotely via video from Australia.