Just a weekend at the French Riviera, not for the sun and beach but for the 9th Joomla Day France on the 9th and 10th of May. This was going to be my first Joomla Day in a language I do not understand. Despite that I was scheduled to give a presentation, run the Bug Squash session and play Doctor Joomla.

To make sure that the audience would be able to understand my GitHub for beginners presentation, we had arranged for a live translator. Nicholas from HikaShop was there to translate my presentation into French. This turned out to be very valuable as not only was Nicholas there to translate but also to answer questions from the audience.

After the presentation it was time to dig in and get to work on the bug squash session. Since the bug squash session was at the same time as the presentations, the attendance was low but a few people stayed around and got to work. Other international attendees were Viktor Vogel and Peter Martin who helped during the bug squash events.

During the bug squash event we used the Bug Squash test server again with Joomla pre-installed in both English and French. This time we added the default texts to be used for updating issues on the issue tracker. These texts will be made available later on the Bug Squash wiki page.

One of the accomplishments coming out of the bug squash session is that an old standing issue, almost 2 years, was finally tested and merged. This made Edwin Cheront a very happy Joomla user.

The second day we arranged for a full day Doctor Joomla session, the reason behind this is that we the international attendees don't speak French but would like to help the French community. In agreement with the organisers of the French Joomla Day, the Doctor Joomla session was added, like the Bug Squash session, this was also a full day session.

The beautiful thing of the Doctor Joomla session was that French users spontaneoulsy came to help as well, which is useful for those looking for help but don't speak English. Quite a few people showed up and asked us to help with their websites. There is one case that has stood out the most for me and it is a story I would like to share with you.

There was one attendee who had flown into Nice for the JoomlaDay from Bordeaux because he also needed help with issues on his site. He had quite a few issues but with the team of Nicolas Claverie, Viktor Vogel and myself we solved all his problems. He was so happy he almost started to speak fluent English instantly. He told us he really likes that we are not capitalists but we help him for free and he is so grateful. This is why we love Joomla, the gratitude is amazing. The story actually doesn't stop there. This user called one of the organisers from the airport telling him how happy he is. This is why I believe the Joomla community is great.

To round things up, I would like to thank the French organisation for having us at their Joomla Day, it was a great event even if you don't speak the language. This is Joomla at its best. Crossing borders. Looking forward to many more Joomla Day events, let's pay it forward.