It wouldn't have been such a delightful meeting if we weren't having the full range of expertise gathering around the small table in South Melbourne's Railway Hotel. From Joomla newbies to Joomla professionals, from sophisticated web strategists to the ultimate 20 years of IT experienced navigator.
Moving forward
This was really our first meeting in a long time and some decisions had to be made. Most importantly, we decided to join forces with Sydney's user group in combining our web representation through joomladay.org.au. From the beginning of November, joomladay.org.au replaces joomlamug.org, which will no longer be maintained.
We also agreed on our new meeting schedule. The Melbourne Joomla User Groups meets from now on every third Wednesday in a months. We are still meeting at different places until we found our ideal venue. You can scribble the dates into your calendar but stay tuned for announcements about the venue.
While the purpose of this meeting was to tap into Patrick's knowledge about strategies with the newsletter component Acajoom, we were getting deeply engaged about all aspects of Joomla and time was simply flying. We finally touched on Acajoom and decided that the topic deserves more time than we had left. We will go in more detail during our next meeting on Wed, 21 November 07.
On the picture you can see Malcom's (sitting behind the laptop) first Joomla installation after Paul (left) and Patrick (right) got his server settings straight in no time. Henry and Chris (from left to right) are standing in the background.
In our discussion Chris mentioned a number of useful tools, and he asked me to share this with the group:
Chris's tips
The Windows program I mentioned, that writes directly to a nominated Section/Category (Blog) is called Blogg-X and is available from the Joomla Extensions area here: http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,search/Itemid,35/searchword,blogg-X/cat_id,0/
The other utility I mentioned, was to do with running multiple versions of Internet Explorer - VERY handy for testing site development. It is "MultipleIEs" and is available from here: http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE
-- Read carefully if you run Windows Vista.
Most developers will probably be aware of this, but just in case...:)
Another tool I find VERY useful is WinMerge http://winmerge.org which can compare code differences between two files - AND can even do a comparison on and two entire (different) folders.
WinMerge is terrific if one does hack a bit of code in a Third Party Joomla add-on (3PD) and then faces the need to do a version upgrade.
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All in all, such a meeting was long overdue and we look forward to catching up soon. Everybody is welcome!
And two more pictures for fun:
