2014 promises to be an eventful year for the Joomla! CMS (pun intended). Of particular interest to us is the release of Joomla 3.3 (which we will cover in our next post), because of its various changes. However, what we’re focusing on in this post is not so much Joomla itself, but the people who are behind it, who code and develop for it, and the people who deploy (i.e. use) Joomla for the website(s) they build.
One of the strengths of Joomla as a CMS is that it has an active and vigorous community of both developers and users. All throughout the year, various meet-ups and conventions focused on Joomla get organised – not only for hardcore evangelists, but for ordinary Joomla folks as well. Yes, there are lots of Joomla! events going on all over the world! Here are a selection of those events:
Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd March 2014
Dutch Joomla! Days – Zeist, the Netherlands (The “Bootstrap on Joomla” giant, Joostrap, is taking part in this one)
Friday May 30th – Sunday June 1st 2014
J and Beyond – Konigstein, Germany (this is a HUGE event, try not to miss it!)
But if you’re in Asia instead, you can attend the Joomla User Group meeting:
Wednesday March 5th 2014
Joomla User Group Pune meeting- Maharashtra, India
Even Africa has a Joomla! Day; in Algeria, of all places. Best if you spoke French if you wanted to attend:
Thursday May 15th and Friday 16th May 2014
Joomla! Day Algeria –Sidi Abdellah, Algeria
And as for Americans, there are easily half a dozen meetings that have been set up to date. Sadly, Oceania and South America are under-represented for the time being – but the year is young, so who knows?
For more information on these and other events, visit the following sites:
https://www.facebook.com/joomla
In addition, consider attending conferences and events of the other open source CMSes around – WordPress has an official WordCamp in San Francisco every year, for instance – and Joomla people have been known to cross-pollinate at such conferences.