Community Magazine

Today the first "Christmas Market" in my hometown opened its doors – and each and every year that's the time when I realize, that another year is almost over. 2014 was a very successful year for Joomla – and I want to show you what the CMS-Garden has contributed to this success.

From March 10 - 14, CeBit, the world's largest IT fair opened its doors in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT is by far the most important IT related fair in Europe and also has a big international impact, which is underlined by the fact that this year’s CeBIT was visited by people from more than 100 different countries. Like last year, the Joomla! project, represented by a team of well known volunteers from the local community, was part of the CMS Garden booth in Hall 6 at the event.

Every so often I have some tweets in my timeline where I can watch people from Joomla! talking really bad about Wordpress. Or Drupal. Or another CMS. And most of the times, people do this because they see all the opensource CMS as opponents on something that they call "the CMS market". Now, take a seat, because here comes a shocking truth: neither Drupal nor Wordpress nor any other opensource CMS is an opponent for Joomla. 

During the last years I got more and more involved in the organisation of two large Joomla! events that are hosted by the German Joomla! Association. Those two events, the Joomla!Day Germany and the international Joomla! conference J&Beyond are held once a year and attended by 200-250 people from all around globe, so it seems to be reasonable to call them "quite big". Since this year, I'm basically "in charge" of all things related to the technical realisation and with this post I want to give you a look behind the scenes, share some lessons that I had to learn, and tell you some best practices that developed over the past few years.