I attended Joomla Day in Cape Town this weekend. Ryan Ozimek from the Joomla core leadership team gave the keynote address, giving us an overview on the people and passion behind Joomla. It is good to know that there is real professionalism and drive behind this great open source innovation.

One of the several highlights for me  was the overview of the new Morph template framework introduced by the the joomla junkies.  Another was the talk by Phehello Mofokeng on the real life world of using Joomla.

Four interesting point raised during the day are as follows:

• Call to action by Ryan to ensure Joomla continues its outreach into Africa. Only time will tell how this will happen, but given the amount of people adopting Joomla daily it is bound to succeed.

• Phelello was passionate about Joomla and other Open source tools being adopted and used to drive empowerment and enablement in all sectors and societies within Southern Africa, including goverment.

• Joomla web design pricing came up again. Some argue that others are undercutting “typical” web design pricing,  thus undervaluing the time, effort and skill investment made in Joomla. I see this often, someone picks up basic Joomla skills and starts pumping out really basic sites, often overcharging the customer horribly.  The other side of the coin needs to be argued as well though,  Joomla is an open source product and as such should be used to empower and bring web sites to those that would not typically have been able to afford professional sites.
• Collaboration on work. Sean suggested all the Joomla developers and designers pool their skills and resources so as to make best use of the numerous opportunities available. Sean will make a special SalesForce CRM page available for everyone to register opportunies and availability. (More details once available….)

Despite some technical issues I think my presentation on Jumi went down OK, with most of the audience getting the benefit and power of mixing Joomla with external code.

Many thanks to Sean Grant, Matthew Philogene and Brendon Hatcher for organising a great event, looking forward to the next one.

Update: Some photos of the event is available here