On Friday, the first ever Joomla! Night was held in Stockholm, Sweden. The event took place in the offices of .SE, the organization in charge of the top-domain for Sweden (.se).
The theme of the Joomla Night was "Joomla at the edge of innovation".
To explore the subject, the organizers had put together a diverse team of speakers. One can say it was a bit controversial. Still, I think it was good to see three different approaches to Joomla and open source, on the same night.
A good crowd
Of course, there were mainly Swedes present at the event. But there were also visitors from Belgium, Norway, Mallorca, United States, Germany and Finland (and maybe even more that I didn't notice).
The whole event was streamed live, and there was around 200 viewers watching.
The event was put together by Martin Blodau, Sarah Watz, Anna Robinson and Marco Barbosa. You can read more about the Joomla Night team.
The road ahead for Joomla
First up was Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters. He talked about the vision for Joomla in the future.
One of the most important messages Ryan had, was about attracting developers to the Joomla project. And more specifically, get young, smart developers involved in improving the Joomla framework:
The goal is to attract, and focus on smart developer energy onto the Joomla framework. We got to find a way to get developers moving forward and focused on the framework.
Additionally, thinking about ways to reach out to those new developers. Reaching out to universities, to colleges around the world. To find ways to get the next generation of folks coming from engineering schools, to learn what this framework is. And how we can use it to help our community move beyond just the CMS.
I don't want to be here next year, talking about the coolest commenting component in Joomla. I wanna be talking about the coolest media system that's been built on the Joomla framework, or a mobile application platform that's been built on the Joomla framework. Or a social networking tool that's been built on the Joomla framework.
That's where I think our value is. And that's where I think our future is.
Ryan also talked about Joomla and compatibility with other database systems. He mentioned compatibility with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Azure (cloud platform). Both platforms now work with Joomla 1.6. This is available now. He also mentioned upcoming support for Oracle databases and said he had been told this would be released in about a month.
That means that if your company is using either of these databases, you can plug Joomla right into that.
Molajo - Joomla 1.6 with add-ons
The second speaker was Marco Barbosa. You might know Marco from a previous interview here on the blog. He's a designer and usability expert, originally from Brazil but living in Stockholm. He did a presentation of Molajo, a distribution of Joomla 1.6.
Molajo means "from Joomla!" - it is a name created from the letters of the Joomla! name.
In much the same manner, Molajo is a distribution created from the powerful and flexible Joomla! 1.6 application framework.
In the future, it is anticipated many Molajo distributions will be shared, each crafted for different vertical markets. The current version of Molajo is more of a general distribution, not specifically targeted at any particular vertical market.
The Molajo distribution is a package of Joomla 1.6, with additonal features added:
- Usability improvements, including ACL simplifications;
- JAdminTools, a single-click administrative solutions, such as permissions modification and database maintenance and backup;
- Construct, a frontend Template framework;
- Minima, an Administrator Template;
- Comments, ratings, social bookmarking, activity logs for Joomla! 1.6 Components;
- Sample extensions for Joomla developers.
Marco was very clear that Molajo is a distribution, not a fork (new project / version). They rely on the Joomla 1.6 core package and will not change that.
The audience following the event online asked if Marco and Ryan could "kiss and hug" to show that there's no bad blood between them. They agreed to hug, but there was no kissing ;)
Nooku - framework and server
The last speaker was Johan Janssens, former Joomla core team developer and co-founder of Joomla. He was there to talk about Nooku, a development framework for Joomla.
From it's beginnings in 2008, Nooku has grown into a powerful open source platform. Hundreds of sites already use custom built Nooku-powered extensions and the number of Joomla! extensions and solutions (Anahita, Ninjaboard, Morph, Ohanah, AEC, ...) that are being build using Nooku technology is increasing day by day.
2010 was the year of the Nooku Community. The new Nooku Developer Portal opened his doors. The GPLv3 adopted and communication resources made public.
In this presentation Johan gave an overview of the current state of the Nooku framework, discusses the latest developments and looked forward what the future will bring.
Nooku Server was released to the public the same day as Joomla Night. And the Nooku SVN was also opened to the public.
Some people don't really understand what Nooku is, and they think it's something for the end-user. It's not. It's aimed at developers that want to simplify their extensions development.
The social part
After the event, we went to the hotel next door, where many of the foreign participants lived. There was beer, there was mingling, there was lively discussions on everything Joomla - and beyond. Lots of interesting and friendly people. I really enjoyed meeting and getting to know more Joomla people. And the beer wasn't bad either.
All in all, I think the event was an interesting one., and a very social one. I look forward to seeing more of these events in other parts of the world.
If you want to see the presentations, take a look at the recorded live stream.