In November the Joomla! community met in Bad Krozingen in Germany to join this year's JoomlaDay™ DACH.

The recurring event is organized by active members of the community from Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is run by J and Beyond e.V. The organisation was perfect and all guests of the conference were cared for very well with food provided during all big and small breaks. The only issue was that the wireless internet was too weak for an IT congress. But with creative ideas all problems could be solved.

About 130 attendees appreciated both: a lot of input in the 34 talks as well as the exchange and networking during the breaks with each other.

The conference traditionally starts with an event on the evening before the official programme starts. Old and new contacts met and talked about Joomla!, the delay of German trains and more.

Two days of full programme

The first day started with a possible preview on the world of websites and website development. Will small agencies close just like video stores did a few years ago? David Jardin is convinced, that the job will definitely be a different one. With artificial intelligence many parts of a web designer's job can be done by users without any technical knowledge. In his presentation he showed how an AI tool made a first draft of a website with an easy prompt in just 15 minutes.

With this provocative start on our future with AI, there were some more talks about AI on this JoomlaDay™, for example

• on video production,
• about automated translations,
• usage in chatbots.

While on JoomlaDay™ DACH 2024 not a single talk was explicitly about AI this time there were five. Together with the keynote talk AI accounted for 18% of the topics.

Further topics were accessibility, best practices in design and programming as well as tips and tricks for solving different problems - with and without extensions.

The active Joomla! community members took advantage of so many users together to do something for the project: Make it happen. Whether documentation, bugs or features - there is always work to be done and the help of volunteers is always welcome. And necessary to keep a successful project alive, move forward and become prepared for the future. In small groups problems and solutions were talked about.

On the second day Sigrid Gramlinger talked about Joomla!'s future. Where will the CMS go to? What are the plans for upcoming releases? With timed releases, updates and life cycles of main versions are predictable and provide reliability for users and developers. The roadmap helps to structure the community and to achieve goals. For example, the feature of automated updates that had been planned for a long time finally got into the core with the last minor update (5.4.) and the new major version (6.0) and was presented in another talk.

Further highlights

There were many more highlights before and after the talks.

J'Otto Award

This year was the 10th German J'Otto Award. This award honors websites, that are well implemented: with creative ideas, high-quality in code and design and further criteria. Overall, 37 websites were submitted in the four categories small, medium-sized, large website and accessibility. The winners were:

• small website: djumla.de by Lukas Jardin
• medium-sized website: madonna-ev.de by Angie Radtke
• large website: neba.at by Sigrid Gramlinger
• accessible website: heb-hagen.de by Angie Radtke

Calm Down

Alexander Metzler helped us to calm down in the evening. He presented a beautiful song with his hand pan. Robert Mittl offered a breathing exercise in the morning to start the day with serenity and energy.

Quiz

On both days there was a quiz with a few questions about Joomla! and the JoomlaDay™'s sponsors. On the first day it did not work online, but with an analogue version the quiz got a sporty touch: Not only the right answer was important, you had to be the first person at the meeting point to give the answer. On the second day, the online voting was possible again - resulting in many more participants. The sponsors also provided the prizes.

Award for the best talk

Defending champion Hanna Znanewitz convinced the audience again. She could take home the cup again - congratulations.

Happy birthday Joomla!

This year's JoomlaDay™ was marked by a special birthday: Joomla! became 20 years old. This was celebrated with a big cake for all attendees and became the motif for this year's T-shirts.

Altogether, it was a great event with a lot of input and nice people. Look forward to the next opportunities to meet the community and join something special: The Joomla World Conference will take place in Potsdam, Germany from 16 to 18 October.

Rona Linke creates and works with Joomla! websites since 2011 and develops the Aimy Extensions since 2014. Besides a highly flexible software, she appreciates being part of the friendly community of this CMS.