Vancouver Joomla! Day – Starting session

9.20 am I managed to borrow Ash’s laptop, so I am liveblogging on a Mac for the first time. Wow. I love MacBook Pro. Steve Jobs, send me a laptop, will you? Photos on Flickr will be tagged <strong>vanjoomladay</strong>

9.30 am Rastin is opening the session. Over 140 people are here (this is the largest ever Joomla! Day in Canada). A month ago, we had a WordCamp (90-100 people). Here we are, a LOT of people know Joomla! in Vancouver.

The Tazzu webpage can be found here. Brad Baker will start. 

Joomla! is really easy to install. There are a handful of people who work full time with Joomla! Another handful do a lot of coding. About four people do Joomla! design templates. There is an abundant cross-section of people. 

The Joomla! project – About 19 million page views, 15 million unique views, 40% bounce rate. Top content <a href=”http://joomla.org”>joomla.org</a&gt;. There are more than 3200 extensions that you can find at extensions.joomla.org.

10 people from the core team of Joomla Project are here right now 🙂 There are hundreds of people involved in the working groups. 

SIDE NOTE – I will have to take a break from the liveblog from about 10am to 11.30 or so, as I have to meet a colleague, but I’ll be back soon and will be back to the liveblog.

Question – How do you position Drupal against Joomla!? – The Drupal project is different to Joomla! 

Question – The transition from one version to another is getting a bit problematic – do you think that’ll be solved soon? – Looking at statistic, more new extensions 1.5 – probably can’t talk about this right now.

Question – Several sites that are 1.0 – is there some means to transition to 1.5? There is a 1.5 migration group (and a live demo). 

Question – Biggest challenges for Joomla project – Personal answer – getting more and more people involved so that development and business support can be expedited. It’s exciting. The project has gone from nothing to absolutely awesome growth.

Question – Is there a good blogging support? WordPress does have good support now – Have you seen the developers.joomla.org site? After listen to some of the presentations you might feel better. Joomla is a CMS and 1.5 is a solid framework. You will see, I think, some blogging add-ons although they’re coming along.

[Time for the next presentation – I am taking a break, back at 11.30am]