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>. 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]