Joomla! and Moodle take flight in Cape Town

A cold, wet and rainy Cape Townian start to winter greeted The Joomla! Southern African Portal Team on our pioneering visit to offer Joomla! End Users and Joomla! Developers courses to a few enthusiastic participants who answered our Joomla! Events Calendar advertisements / Joomla! Journal mailshots, sent to everyone that we had done business with in our brief four year old union with open source software, and in particular the Joomla! Content Management System.

Today saw the first Joomla! End Users Course go off quite smoothly, in a lawyers office in Boston, Bellville, belonging to my father in law, who kindly sponsored the venue.  Working off laptops, networked using an old 10/100Mb hub, and my presentation laptop running on a newly acquired Vodafone Huawei USB HSDPA modem to access the internet, we ploughed right into Joomla! 101 with the aid of the reliable Joomla! Stand Alone Server and the Joomla! User Manual and the Joomla! Visual Tutorials on www.joomla.org.za, we started to explore the notion of open source software and in particular Joomla!

Covering the basic concepts of the Joomla! architecture, such as the separation of content from template and the variations made possible by modular positioning within the template, the way to plan a websites structure and work from the article level back up to the menu structure, choices related to sections, categories, and static content items, the way to find  and select extensions to add features and functionality to the website-in-a-box package that is supplied on installation of Joomla!

Although the one day crash course is rather challenging for a newbie, and even disturbing to a php developer, who has become accustomed to working with a web authoring software application, by the end of the day the participants, who ranged from someone who had never seen Joomla! before, but had some experience with other content management systems, to a website developer, who was quite familiar the whole web design process through managing other professional developers all said that the day had been insightful, productive and useful.

Tomorrow sees the Joomla! Developers Course get underway, so there will be more to report on that post-course.

We enjoyed meeting a number of Cape Town based Joomla! developers & service providers at the Durbanville Mugg & Bean (but not their 5 min limit to complimentary wireless access - just enough time to check my Gmail to confirm our next meeting since my mobile's battery died as we arrived at M&B).

It was Moodle however that got the first slot on our busy schedule, when we met with Pierre de Villiers of AOSIS, who are the official Moodle Partner for South Africa , to discuss Moodle Training in South Africa to their growing client base who make up growing Moodle Southern African Community .

Evidence of the uptake of Moodle was confirmed later the very same day when I received an independent email from Markus Mostert, the Moodle Administrator at Rhodes University, which was copied to Robert M. Alfonsi (also at RU) and Anton Pienaar, the Moodle Administrator at UOFS who have recently deployed Moodle as their chosen LMS. Seems there is an interest to establish a Moodle User Group for Southern Africa too.  More on that in another email though.

Back to Joomla and other open source matters, first up was Mathew Philogene of Raramuri Design, a skilled coder who shared his thoughts on proper Joomla! template design , graphic recreation from print medium to web medium and some positive discussion about a Joomla! Day for Cape Town soon.  Anyone interested? We could use a venue / refreshments / wireless of course / participants etc..

Next was Nico Ungerer of In2One who like most of us, decided to switch all their web design to Joomla!, once they crossed paths with the humble, award winning CMS. Nico brings an impressive portfolio of systems development and integration, data warehousing, connectivity design, process development and are the MTN Partner for telecommunications. We look forward to all that Nico promises to bring to the community, including the recent registration of Joomza, which promises to be a Joomla! powered site in the very near future.

Lastly we were able to meet with Jeane at Hetzner, our trusty and reliable ISP (leading hosting company in SA at time of press), with whom we discussed some ideas that we would like to see included in the KonsoleH account control panel, such as a Joomla! Installer, a Moodle Installer and other reseller / managed server client resources that would ensure that they continue to provide the lead in website and email hosting in the country and beyond. 

Some exciting potential ideas were discussed here and we trust that Hetzner will see the value in developing their service portfolio so that their Joomla! and Moodle Southern African user clients will be able to do everything related to installing, backing up, copying, upgrading, restoring and optimising their CMS websites for speed, security and search engine friendliness, which is not entirely possible with the existing KonsoleH control panel.

A very promising idea that was put on the table by the Joomla! SA Portal was that Hetzner direct all Joomla! related queries to the Joomla! Southern African User Group's mailing list, which was recently deployed. This would have the effect of diverting the growing demand for support on Joomla! powered sites away from Hetzner and to the community. 

Coupled with this was the idea to de-brand the Hetzner Support Site, so that it could be added to the User Menu as a wrapper on any Joomla! powered websites , making for another quick reference resource that end-users, administrators and developers could refer to that would offer country and network and ISP specific knowledge and support, with the added option of adding / requesting advice and articles on a particular problem.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints we could not connect with Stephen of Com-du-IT who were no less than a 2006 Top Technology 100 emerging qualifier. If only Newlands and Durbanville were not so far apart and other meetings so tightly scheduled!  Hang, if only we lived here in CT! 

Now that brings me to another point; The Cape Linux User Group (CLUG) has really been a great support, in allowing us to send our Joomla! announcements on their mailing lists, which may seem OT for the users whose operating systems are purely command-line driven, however thanks to CLUG, following our email on Thursday afternoon, we managed to hold the two key meetings mentioned above and connect with Stephen, whom we hope to see on our next trip to Cape Town, for some more Joomla! Training and hopefully a Cape Town Joomla! Day, around 23 June 2007.


Well, that is a real mouthful for one days writing, so cheers and goodbye until next time.

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