SJD09 Review

Written by Tim Plummer

Sydney Joomla Day 2009

The Sydney Joomla day conference kicked off with Brad Baker talking about the Joomla infrastructure and hosting. The site statistics were impressive, and the content delivery network used to distribute international traffic load was interesting. Brad also demonstrated a basic Joomla installation, which is the site that was used for other demonstrations throughout the day. Brad was the first of many people to comment that your choice of web host is very important for Joomla security, but I don't want to start shamelessly dropping sponsers names such as eNerds or Rochen.

Up next was Andrew Eddie, and the highly anticipated Joomla 1.6 ACL, which was like a part 2 of the Joomla presentation Andrew did in Brisbane in July. The ACL looks extremely powerful and somewhat daunting at first, but it is really going to add much needed flexibility to many sites. There are some big changes for developers who will need to rewrite parts of their extensions.

After morning tea, Patrick Jackson spoke about SEO, and explained what the various SEO settings do and how we should use them. Patrick also highlighted some things to avoid, and pointed out some third party SEO extensions that are worth a look.

Sam Moffatt explained about Joomla security and reiterated how the first step to a secure Joomla site is to choose a good web host. He unlocked the mysteries of .htaccess files, and gave some other security tips like making the admin user registered and disabling the account. Sam also demonstrated how easy Joomla is to keep up-to-date by using one of his extensions.

At the same time, the beginners' stream covered Joomla 101 with Jason Hando and Dex Randall.

After lunch, Sasha Utjesenovic gave us an insight on how to optimize a Joomla site to work on a mobile device such as an iPhone or Blackberry. Many audience members were able to see live impacts of his mobile enhancements to the demonstration site via their smart phones.

We then had our first lightning talk by Nicholas Hamilton on how to make your site purpose driven.

Pamela Fox from Google gave us an introduction to Google Wave, and possible ways to integrate with Joomla.

Tim Plummer did our second lightning talk with a live demo of an extension that he has developed called BF Survey Pro.

Robert Fairhead was our third lightning talk, who gave a real world example of how a static HTML site for a dog club was converted to Joomla and the associated benefits.

Our final lightning talk was by Peter Bui, who gave us some tips on site optimization, some of which he had discovered as a result of a really poor internet connection in the past.

Andrew Eddie gave a second talk to tell us about the future of Joomla. He hinted that Joomla Alpha 2 was only weeks away, which is great news. He also told us how developers will be able to play with the Joomla code in a sandbox environment which will make it easier for people to contribute enhancements in the future.

Dex Randall from Spike Systems did a great job at organizing and running the day, and all in attendance really appreciate the hard work that she has done to make the day such a success.

The Sunday workshops were a great opportunity to spend some time with the experts.

Sam Moffatt's security workshop was a really good hands on experience. Experimenting with .htaccess files and password protected directories was fun. The demonstration of some of his extensions was useful, and the LDAP and SSO topics were of great interest to the attendees who use Joomla in a corporate environment.

Andrew Eddie's developer workshop was not for the faint hearted. Andrew managed to pack so much knowledge into a short time span that our heads were nearly exploding by the end, but at the same time we were just itching to start playing with code and applying this knowledge. The insights into Joomla 1.6 were fantastic.

For those that missed out, you'll just have to wait till February 2010 for Melbourne's next Joomla Day.