How did the first Vancouver Joomla Demo Camp go?

I was supposed to blog about this event last week around Wednesday or Tuesday, but I simply didn’t get the time. We were so busy working on the client projects, that it was difficult to allocate free blogging time.

We had around 20 people attending this event at the Network Hub last Tuesday. For this session we managed to construct a simple website for an imaginary Dance and Modeling school (The Broadway School of Dance & Modeling) using the Joomla! CMS version 1.5. We also showed how Joomla! CMS could easily integrate with the other major social media services such as Flickr, YouTube, Google Calendar, and Eventbrite. The idea was to show people how to utilize the power of those great hosted solutions within their Joomla powered websites without having to do any crazy php software development.

We have used 3 templates from RocketTheme to put together this presentation, and instead of using any Powerpoint slides, we chose to construct the website right in front of people. In fact as we were going through the session, my business partners Arash from PeerGlobe Technology, and Jeannette from JenTekk Web Solutions were collaborating with me on putting the website together. Our goal was to demonstrate the collaborative side of an online content management system and the reality that an organization doesn’t have to rely on a Web Master to maintain their website, and therefore adopting a more team-oriented and collaborative approach would be far more cost effective.

At the end Jeannette made a presentation about the Joomla! CMS 1.5 new template engine and an explained how it provides unlimited options to different page layouts on a website.

There are more pictures from this event on my flickr account.

This event was sponsored by

[tags]opensource, event, democamp, joomla, cms, content management, presentation, demo, vancouver[/tags]