Joomla! User Network Ahmedabad (JUG Ahmedabad) co-organized a Joomla Workshop with Ahmedabad University. By doing this workshop our goal was to help university students learn and make Joomla learning easier for them, which they never expected. We hosted this workshop at an Ahmedabad University class room, with 26 students and faculty participating.

The Plan

The plan was to start with our Joomla! CMS Awareness and outreach programme of JUG Ahmedabad. The day when I registered this Joomla User Network Ahmedabad officially on Joomla Groups, I had only one thing in my mind... in Ahmedabad, there is no active community or any activity for Joomla and PHP, where so many companies mainly work in Joomla!. When I was an engineering student, it wasn't until I got training in company that I really became aware of PHP or Joomla, or any other open source technology, because of the lack of exposure in our colleges. Here was my idea... I thought that with JUG Ahmedabad, I could help students, so we started this programme.

The plan was that first we will do a seminar to explain to students "What is Joomla?" and "What does the Joomla Community do?", how we work in Joomla as a community member, etc.. If this seminar was successful then we would do a workshop which would be fully technical for those interested in learning Joomla but were not able to get started because of lack of information. We would provide them with a medium to understand Joomla easily.

The Joomla! Workshop was held January 1-4, 2015. It was divided in two parts: PHP and Joomla sessions. The first two days were for PHP and it was organised by Dr. Sandeep Vasant, a professor at Ahmedabad University. The other two days were handled by me and my JUG Ahmedabad Team. Speaking about Joomla was Gunjan Patel (Components) and Mrunal Pittalia (Modules). Yes, it is hard to explain PHP and Joomla in two days. Actually, it was not planned to cover all of PHP and Joomla in two days. Our goal was to explain Joomla Basic Development and MVC Structure and make it easy for them by giving tricks and summaries of the whole structure.

In these two days, we covered:

• Joomla! Coding Standards
• Joomla! Basic Component for Frontend Development
• Joomla! Basic Component for Backend Development and Database Connectivity
• Joomla! Module Development

Reviews

We got some interesting reviews which I would like to share.

Question: Your thoughts about Joomla! and Open Source technologies?

“Open source should always be motivated”

“I found it very good and I feel that by using this we can do smart work rather than doing a hard work.”

“I was not aware of Joomla technology and learned a lot about this Joomla open source technology”

“It is a very good and demanding technology.”

“It is an emerging framework and is feature rich. I attended the workshop as I am fond of learning new things and would like to explore this framework.”

Thank you so much to my loving J! Community for support and inspiration. And a special thanks to Javier Gomez for continuously guiding and inspiring me for this workshop, as a friend and Joomla community member.

Links & Resources

https://www.facebook.com/jugAhmedabad/
http://events.joomla.org/events/908-jug-ahmedabad-four-days-sttp-on-php-and-joomla
https://prezi.com/mhw51udh6wwu/joomla-cms-and-awareness-of-students/
https://prezi.com/kz04tmvoe3mn/jug-ahmedabad-january-2015-sttp-workshop-on-joomla/
https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Developing_a_MVC_Component/Developing_a_Basic_Component
http://www.slideshare.net/patelgunjan/develop-basic-joomla-mvc-component-for-version
http://www.slideshare.net/patelgunjan/develop-advance-joomla-mvc-component-for-version