On August 14th and 15th, OSTraining hosted an event called Joomla3 Day. During the event, several people from the  community did presentations on various aspects of using Joomla.

One of the presentations was an hour-long presentation on the new version of K2 which is now in beta stage. The stable version of K2 v.3 is set for release late September / early October 2014.

In the presentation, Fotis Evangelou, main developer of K2, goes through K2 in general and then goes into detailed explanation of K2 version 3.

K2 is one of the most popular extensions for Joomla. The CCK (Content Construction Kit) has been a favorite for a lot of devs for years, me included. Since Joomla 3 was released, K2 has started to seem a bit outdated, though. That's soon to change, with the release of K2 version 3.x.

In this post, you will find a short demo video from JoomlaWorks, showing the responsiveness of the new User Interface. In the example, K2 v3.x is running on a remote (busy) dev server.

When Joomla 3.0 was released, it incorporated a lot of new user interface elements in the administrator. Compared to Joomla 1.5 and 2.5, it was a big step forward, in my opinion. The inclusion of Twitter Bootstrap did a lot for the interface, but in the first iterations of Joomla 3.0, it was a bit immature.

Now, with the release of Joomla 3.2, the interface has been reworked quite a bit. Nothing revolutionary, but little things in many places, to improve how you work with the administrator. As one who has built large sites with Joomla 3.1, I think these improvements will be very helpful and time-saving.

At J and Beyond 2012, the idea of a Joomla! App Store was discussed. Now, a couple of years later, we will soon see the arrival of the Joomla Extension Finder. Also known as "Install from web".

The Joomla Extension Finder is integrated into the Extension Manager in the Joomla administrator. You need to confirm that you want to install the Extension Finder plugin before using this new function. This also means you accept the terms of use for the JED (Joomla Extensions Directory).

Joomla 3.2 is just around the corner, with the RC (Release Candidate) version released last week. One of the major things in Joomla 3.2 is content versioning. This means you can roll back to older versions of an article. You also have functions like compare, so you can see what has changed between different versions of your article.

Check out the video, where Mark Dexter explains how content versioning in Joomla 3.2 works in detail.

In this video, Jack Bremer does his yearly walk-through of the J and Beyond venue in Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands.

The hotel itself is HUGE and we only managed to cover the actual conference area. I actually had to use a map to find my room when I arrived at the hotel. Now, sit back and let Jack take you on a run through the venue.

During his keynote at J and Beyond 2013, Rod Martin talked about life being short (and so is he).

What should we do about that? Lots of things - but one of the things we should do is say «thank you».

I hope this video inspires you!

It's Saturday night at J and Beyond 2013 (well, it's already Sunday), and I'm about to go to bed. Checking the #jab13 tweets, I find a tweet from Sander Potjer with an image from the Bug Squashing Session going on - and I head over there to see what's going on. The room is packed with coders and testers, and the hours fly by!

Google Tag Manager is a new, free service from Google that helps you set up and manage your web site code snippets. Tags, as Google call them, are code snippets like the Google Analytics tracking code and more. You can add any type of tags to the tag manager, not only Google related ones.

I have previously written about how to add Javascript snippets to your Joomla web sites. The tag manager makes this even easier, and you can get away with adding just one piece of code.

Like in previous years, I've put together a video with some impressions from J and Beyond. This year's video features some highlights from the third J and Beyond conference, which took place in Bad Nauheim, Germany, at the beautiful Dolce hotel.

You will see a bit of the venue, some interviews with attendees, and some highlights from the sessions and the J!OSCARs awards ceremony.