Joomla DemoCamp - igniting the flame!
Last night Rastin, Arash, and myself held a Joomla 1.5 DemoCamp at the Network Hub in Vancouver. Turn out was really good! The feedback that I’ve received already indicates that this event was a success, with attendees’ passions ignited, and truly excited about using Joomla 1.5 themselves!
I arrived about 10 minutes early expecting to see a handful of people there, but was very delighted to find the room already full, with people eager to learn about Joomla. Needless to say, the event started right on time!
Rastin (rmdStudio) opened the evening by introducing Joomla 1.5, while Arash (PeerGlobe) and I (as part of our demonstration) populated an empty Joomla site with content. The template for our project was provided by Andy Miller of RocketTheme - thanks Andy!!
The objective of the night was to show how easy it is to develop a website with Joomla 1.5 CMS.
We demonstrated how content (items) needed to be organized into Sections and Categories, and that we are then able access the organized content by creating menu items. We added several menu items to the main menu, each with a different layout - blog format, list format, and table format.
Rastin, who is an enthusiastic advocate for Open Source and Social Network Marketing also showed us how to implement free marketing tools into our Joomla site. I am always amazed at the number of free tools out there, and how they add so much value to your website when used properly. We added Flickr, YouTube, Google Calendar, EventBrite, and Joomla Extensions and Plug-ins to our demo site to show how to increase it’s functionality and marketing muscle.
The night wrapped up with me quickly running over Joomla 1.5 Template design. Firstly, I acknowledged Barrie North of CompassDesign for writing and making available to us his Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial, as my notes were bits and pieces of his original tutorial. Thanks again Barrie!
We lighlty touched on the core template files, commands to call joomla modules, module display styles, and css.
As we ran out of time, I indicated that I would post some resources for Joomla 1.5 Template development. Hopefully these will get you on your way to creating your own Joomla 1.5 Templates!
Joomla 1.5 Template Resources
- Joomla DemoCamp - 1.5 Template Elements (short notes)
- CompassDesign - Joomla 1.5 Template Tutorial
- RocketTutorials - Joomla Template Tutorials
- Joomla.org - Joomla 1.5 Template Forum
If you know of any others, feel free to let me know! I’d luv to hear from you!
A huge thank you goes out to everyone who made this event a great success, including Rastin (rmd Studios), Arash (PeerGlobe), Robert (Network Hub), Andy (RocketTheme), Barrie (CompassDesign) and all those who participated - THANK YOU! 
Technorati Tags: joomla 1.5, joomla template tutorial, compass design, rockettheme, rockettutorials, rmd studio, peerglobe, network hub, website design, jentekk
March 10th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
The evening was fantastic, and I am now well on my way to developing the info architecture for a new site, to be powered entirely (well, almost - I’ll plug in a wp blog) by Joomla!
From my blog entry written during the Demo Camp:
“Attending developer forums like this is not only a requisite for developers. It is a requisite for anyone with practical interest in the industry; familiarity with emergent information technologies is as necessary for practitioners and academics in IT Law as reading biotech journals is for patent lawyers.”
March 11th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I actually enjoyed that night alot.. I think Rastin covered some great topics. One thing I might like to see is less questions about topics other than what the DemoCamp was intended for. Thanks for the event though. I hope for more things like that in the future.
March 11th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Hey Jer, glad to hear you enjoyed the night. I’m looking forward to your input at our next Joomla meetings, as by then you’ll have some very valuable opinions on developing a Joomla site!
March 11th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Hiya Eddie, happy to hear it! It was really nice to finally meet you. Thanks for your feedback, I agree 100% that we should stay on topic. At the next (Joomla) meeting, Rastin and I need to make it very clear right at the start, that we need to stay on topic, and encourage other topics of interest to be discussed once we are through the presentation. That was in part, one of the reasons why there was no time left for a proper Template Tutorial presentation. Thanks again, I really appreciate the input. See you around!
March 27th, 2008 at 7:52 am
It is great to here that there was such an interest in your bootcamp demo for Joomla 1.5.
We are scratching the surface with Joomla 1.5 but have been able to devlop awesome sites with it i.e. http://www.clicksmap.com but looking into the coding and working onsites well upto 12months every since the beta versions came out has given us some great insights.
Hope to see some good stuff with the best CMS going
Azzam
March 29th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Thank you Azzam!