With 169 user groups around the world, there is always something exciting and interesting happening in the Joomla! Community! This is a monthly round-up highlighting new Joomla! User Groups, events, and reviews of JUG meetings. If you have anything you would like me to feature from your Joomla User Group please send me an email at
New team members
It’s always a delight to welcome new members to the team who process JUG registrations and generally help to ensure that User Groups around the world have a ‘point of contact’ should they need any help or support. This month, we welcome two JUG organisers to the team - Helvecio da Silva from Brazil, and Jan van Kuijk from the Netherlands.
J and Beyond
A lot of the team were at the recent J and Beyond conference in Germany and had the opportunity to meet up with lots of JUG Organisers and to register a new JUG, which was a great outcome! We also started some documentation resources athttp://docs.joomla.org/Joomla_User_Groupswhich we hope will serve as a useful source of information for people wanting to create new User Groups or needing inspiration for existing groups.
Using events.joomla.org
We have received a request from the Events team for JUGs to add their events on events.joomla.org - the official events calendar for Joomla. The PR team who help promote Joomla worldwide use this as a central source for finding out events happening around the world, but JUG events are significantly under-represented.
The website received a refresh just recently and is much easier to use than in the past, so please do visit events.joomla.org and submit your JUG meetings!
JUG Registrations
May has been a quiet month for JUG Registrations, however we were able to process a new registration at J and Beyond for Joomla User Group Rhein-Neckar in Germany.
What's happening?
J and Beyond is one of the main events in the Joomla calendar which took place last week in Germany. The JUG Team had a good representation at the event and were able to meet with many JUG organisers and members during the weekend. We also registered a new JUG during the event!
There were also several JoomlaDay events:
JUG Seattle
Over the past few months we have been working to revive user meetups in the Seattle area. With consistency in location and presentations geared to end users our turnout has been on the rise. Free food doesn’t hurt either ;-)
Thanks to DevLocal (a Seattle co-working space) we now have a consistent venue and equipment to hold our meetings. Towards the beginning of the month we’ve successfully registered and gained approval as a non-profit in Washington state.
Our May meet up took place on the 21st with 16 attendees. David Spring, who has taught web design/development classes and wrote books about Joomla and is a member of the Joomla Certification working-group, gave a presentation on “Building an Interactive Responsive Business Site”. He provided a number of tips on different aspects of setting up and managing a responsive site.
To find out more please visit http://www.meetup.com/seattlejoomla/
{gallery}/media/jw_sigpro/users/0000000576/JUG Seattle May 2014{/gallery}
Joomla Users Group Bay Area
We had an awesome meetup last week.
The topic was Working the Business Side with Joomla. Event on meetup link is http://www.meetup.com/joomla-bay-area/events/178466412/.
To start we went around the room and found out what people wanted to discuss or know or learn from others about. Our main topic points ended up being:
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How to handle security updates/bug fixes for doing maintenance for clients and how people charge for the task. Many variations came forward on how to do this.
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Legal structure for doing business in the state of California (doing business in the state of California isn't easy).
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The flow of the proposal process and not so much how much people charge but how they structure payments in the terms of the contract/proposal (50% down, etc.).
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A biggie was talking about value and worth; the value we as developers/designers/integrators/implementers bring to the client and what that is worth. This is more of an inner self activity and while we didn't get into guided meditations to handle the baggage of how people view themselves or anything like that, it is something everyone needs to do on their own to look at themselves and take a "journey" if necessary.
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We talked about some tools too: watchful, freshbooks, aiga.com, freelancersunion.org.
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We also talked about advertising on websites and a bit of affiliate marketing.
All in all, great meetup that everyone got a lot of ideas out of on how to do handle ones Joomla business better.
{gallery}/media/jw_sigpro/users/0000000576/Bay Area May 2014{/gallery}