A small gathering of four NoVA JUG members attended a 3-hour meeting on November 18, 2009, at the Parkridge VI venue. Present were:
- Bruce Scherzinger
- Dorothy Firsching
- Don Cranford
- Mike Tessman
There were no remote attendees. The meeting started at about 7:30pm (on schedule) and ended quite late (10:30). Important to note is that the Parkridge VI venue is now a mainstay for our JUG. It's a comfortable and well-equipped professional conference room setting and is now available for any of our regular meetings provided Bruce S attends.
Topics discussed were:
- SEO, SEF and what to look for in extensions to be sure of compatibility
- Joomla Day DC - Yes, we want this to happen! Let's start talking seriously about it and if necessary let's get other area JUGs involved (e.g., new Baltimore JUG)
- Available books on Joomla 1.5, particularly beginner books and books on specific aspects such as security, templates, etc. Joe, ya shoulda been there!
- Speaking of templates, we never really got to discuss what's going to be new and different in Joomla 1.6 in the area of templates. However, we talked about buying versus writing templates and which commercial templates are better than the rest. With our small group, we didn't really have enough exposure to say for sure.
- Though we did poke around the back end of a test site Bruce installed with a 1.6 alpha Hope version. And while we were in the 1.6 alpha site back end, we took a quick tour of some of the more interesting and exciting features of 1.6, namely:
- Access Control Lists
- Redirection
- Cascaded Categories
- Template Style Cloning
- The Menu Manager
- We also discussed poll and survey components other than PollXT. I don't recall anyone mentioning that 1.6 will not ship with a poll component, but it won't.
We are pleased to welcome Don Cranford to the group. Don owns and operates a website design/development company called Katalyst Solutions (http://www.katalystsolutions.com). Don has been using Joomla exclusively since it forked from Mambo and has some history with Mambo as well. Nearly all the sites his company develops are built on Joomla. Don's experience using Joomla professionally brings yet another significant resource to our growing and very talented group.
Also new to our group is Mike Tessman, a cohort of Bruce Scherzinger who is what we in the community call a "Joombie" or Joomla newbie. Mike has been a professional software engineer for his entire career of 30 some-odd years, mainly focusing on ground support software for the aerospace industry. He is learning to love PHP and is letting Bruce help him with the migration of a 1.0 Joomla site to 1.5.
Just as we were adjourning the meeting, we decided to just go ahead and schedule the December meeting for Wednesday the 16th. Look for it in our Group Meetings and please do try to attend. It will be at the Parkridge venue again unless someone comes up with a better idea. Topics are being solicited as of today. Hope to see you all there!