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

Ever tought of making a living from Joomla! ? Or you've already have taken the action and have created your own Joomla! based business. This presentation is a real study case that might help you to focus on the most important things that single person business owners should bear in mind when launching/growing their start-up proyect:

• Evaluation of the Por's & con's of the existing options: Employee vs Freelancing vs Business owner
• 5 Key proven business concepts that will help growing your business:
  
  • Scalability
  • Leverage
  • Find your niche or die
  • Outsourcing
  • Cash flows
• Success Stories in the Joomla Community

A must for students or Joomla! entrepreneurs wanabees, and a reflection trip for joomla! entrepreneurs or business owners. Something different, worth a talk and a great Q&A session. The idea is to share experiences and try to help others to avoid to make the same mistakes over and again when creating a Joomla! based business.

Increasingly companies are aware that they need to consider mutiple CMS options and choose the one that is right for a particular project. Fortunately there are many areas of overlap between the big 3: Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress.

This discussion will compare the theme and template structures of Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress.

• Which files and concepts are similar?
• What differences do you need to be aware of for each CMS?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the three different approaches?
• How easy would it be to migrate a design from one to another?

This is a workshop about how to customize Virtuemart using the Virtuemart Themes and the new (since 1.1.4) User-Classes. I will show, how most of the extensions can be done without hacking the core code. There will be lots of live-examples with code shown and tips for best practice for fast and secure solutions.

I will also cover the new Virtuemart 1.5. If it is released until the event, it can of course take a bigger part.

It would be great if visitors who are interested in this workshop will submit questions before the event which we can use in the workshop.

A crash course in Design Patterns: recipes to solve common problems in Object Oriented Programming. The essence of all 23 "classical" Gang of Four patterns will be quickly made clear by using unique simple drawings. I will also show some code examples from Joomla! and Nooku. N.B.: this is about software design, not about template design. It is about writing better programs. And it is exciting (for geeks and nerds like me).

What are webservices and what can you do with it? I'll show some examples of integrating Joomla! with a desktop program (written in Delphi). For example to quickly add a folder with pictures or other content. We will connect to Flex/Flash and combine webapplications in a SOA. We will use XML/RPC and show how to better integrate that in the Joomla!-backend. Even SOAP will be shown within Joomla! (with a short example of the advantages of a WSDL when connecting to such a webservice). In the end a RESTful API for Joomla! will be presented. In short: we connect everything together as a whole.

Flash has nice possibilities. Many exiting sites have been made with it. Besides being a way to make animations, it has grown to a full-blown platform for client-side (web)applications with good cross-browser consistency. But the combination with a CMS is still a bit underdeveloped. During the last year we have made several websites with a complete front-end in Flash, using a Joomla! backend.

You'll get practical hints how to use Flash for templates with many possibilities, that still load fast and have good SEO.

The importance of ecommerce in Joomla! is constantly growing. More and more shop-extensions and other ecommerce related extensions are available.

I think it could be an interesting session to discuss the "future of Joomla! ecommerce". It would be great to gather the developers of major / important ecommerce extensions like Virtuemart, Valanx, RedShop, Tienda, ... (excuse me if I have forgotten another important one, I can only think of Virtuemart) and present, discuss the strategies and features  and answer questions about what will be.

If any other ecommerce-developer is interested in preparing this or just letting me know if he will be on the JAB10, please contact me.

In the fast-moving world of Free Open Source Software, providing outstanding support is usually relegated to the "we'll deal with that later" column; but what if you could learn some proven effective ways to differentiate your business by shifting the Support Desk into the "mission-critical" column, and then following through on that best intention?

Created for open source software developers and their team members, "Great, But How's The Support?" will explore how to best implement and provide customer support and service for your software providers.

Managing projects is hard. Managing projects with today's frantic pace is even harder. Sometimes you can make do with a simple tool; other times you can use a hosted platform such as Basecamp. What do you do when you need more control, more customization?

Redmine is the most advanced project management platform available, and it's open source. Deep integration between tasks, wiki entries, and commit messages makes for a powerful interface and happier clients. And of course it integrates with our favorite little content management system, Joomla!

Mitch demonstrates with a hands-on tour of what Redmine can do for you, including installation and setup, general usage, and customization through third party themes/plugins and your own custom code.

This session is for people who go beyond the administrative interface of Joomla and write PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or other custom code as a part of their daily work. Many inexpensive or free tools exist to help you track your work, debug, test your user interface, explore your markup, and generate code. However, many solo programmers have not heard of these tools or know how to use them.

Most importantly, you must use a version control system to track your code. This helps you explore your code history and also eliminates the need for ugly .bak files. Version control gives you the freedom to make changes without worrying about losing your original code.