JenTekk Blog

(photo courtesy of Rastin Mehr of rmd Studio)

Hey! I attended my very first ever Joomla event this past Saturday – namely the Vancouver Joomla DocCamp. With no expectations other than to meet people, have fun, play with and write about Joomla 1.5, it did not dissappoint.

So it started…

The Joomla 1.5 DocCamp got well underway at 9:30am with eventually 17 of us hanging out at the Network Hub in Vancouver. The ultimate goal – after consuming questionable amounts of Timmy’s coffee and donuts – was to document via blog, wiki, video etc., one or more aspects of Joomla 1.5 CMS.

Rastin Mehr started out with a brief introduction to the history of websites and their functions on the web, from static sites, to dynamic websites, content managment systems (Joomla and WordPress) and brought us right around to the future of social intranet sites. Discussions revolved around these topics for a bit until we noticed it was really time to ‘get down to work’.

Poking around Joomla 1.5

Each attendant was supplied access to the Administrator Panel of a default installation of a Joomla 1.5 website, and was encouraged to play around with it. Rastin set this up on his server the night before, thanks so much Rastin!

I chose to check out and write about the Joomla Article and Menu manager, and how they are used to achieve a proper information architecture. In addition to Joomla Template design, I am often responsible for organizing the website content in an intuitive and comprehensive structure – so this seemed like a natural choice.

Monica Hamburg who sat beside me, was a newbie to Joomla 1.5 – however she didn’t let that stop her from breaking the site. In the spirit of playing around she innocently inserted a horizontal rule (set to 100%) in her test page – see image below. You go girl!

We sure had a good laugh at this!

Lunch at Steamworks was delicious, after filling our faces, we marched on back to Network Hub – even catching a glimps of that bright ball in the sky on route.

Blogging, interviews, wiki and video blogging…

For the rest of the day, the light tapping sound of fingers on laptop keyboards could be heard with people blogging and contributing to Joomla Wiki – how sweet it is!

Bruce Byfield dropped by at the end of the day to interview a few of those in attendance. Rastin also joined in with video blogging.

As to what will all come out of this — stay tuned! I will post more info on the results as they come in.

Great big thank you!

I’d like to say a huge thank you to all the sponsors, and everyone who showed up and made this event memorable. It was a great time!

• Rastin Mehr
• Ash Sanieyan & Kim-Anh Duong
• Monica Hamburg
• Robert Park
• Minna
• Alicia
• Erica Lam
• Gwyn Pritchett
• Jacob Atchison
• Steven Paul
• Lee Down
• Mike Toscano
• David Westrom
• Steven Stark & Annette Uchman
• Bruce Byfield

For more information on the participants, visit rmdStudio Blog – its very well done!

Technorati Tags: joomla, joomla 1.5, joomla 1.0, docCamp, Vancouver BC, Network Hub, Peerglobe, rmd Studio, Tazzu, JenTekk

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Giving Back, Joomla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.