Joomla! Day 2011 Malaysia - post mortem

Was getting all excited about the Joomla Day Malaysia 2011, that was being held in KLCC Tower 2, Microsoft HQ, Level 29. Registration starts at 8.15 am so I left home at around 5.45 am in the morning. Reached the Seremban station at around 6 am and was told that the first train was initially at 5.30 am and I missed second train which is the 6 pm train, so I had to wait for the 6.30 am train instead. While was waiting for the train, I was told by one of the passengers that it took him at least 8 am to reach KL Sentral, if he took the 6.30 train. I was like in shock knowing that I will be late for the event. I still needed to take the LRT to KLCC once I reach KL Sentral.

The ride indeed took one and a half hours and so I decided to catch the taxi instead to KLCC. At KLCC Tower 2, I then had to line up for a good 15-20 mins for the temporary Petronas Tower pass. A good long queue was already forming and you can see from their faces they are as anxious as I am to attend the event. But something caught my eye during the queue, some of them was already wearing the Joomla Day T-shirt which they should have given us prior to the event like delivering it to our houses so we can at least wear it to the event !(it needs to be washed first since it smells like it just came out of the coloring machine or something)

I then went through the security checks(just like the airport ones), and took the elevator all the way up to 29th floor. There, once the elevator door opens, you can easily notice that you are at the Microsoft Malaysia Office, and wow, the feeling is indeed awesome. If only they had or require technical people to work for them in their Malaysia HQ.

At the reception, the Joomla Day team had another round of checks to identify that we are the right people who are attending it and THEN they start giving out the T-shirts. We are then ushered inside a Session Room called Session A where Ryan Ozimek gave his introduction speech about Joomla's outlook in the current market and etc. I was actually quite impressed on how he manage to attract enough attention so we all would actually PAY ATTENTION to what he was saying. Maybe his presentation is indeed 'different' than the others.

Ryan Ozimek and his presentation

To cut this short, I was actually quite impressed with only 2 presenters which is Ryan Ozimek and none other than Chris Roult who actually rocked the Joomla Designers world by showing his Morph Framework. This framework is so user friendly that it looks easy to design a joomla template. It would take weeks to design a template and this MORPH framework looks like it can actually cut the time frame to half. In my mind, I would definitely go home and try this out, but even before I can actually think how am I going to download it knowing it could either be a Commercial software or free, Chris announced that its going to be released as a free software under the GPL Open source license. This is even better news for all of us. Support and FREE !

A serious full house...

The day went on with JomSocial trying to coax us to buying the software and I had to actually do some deep thinking, why do we need JomSocial when we have things out there like Facebook ? Even if we developers actually manage to build something like another version of Facebook, what makes you think users would join the social network you created ? Its like reinventing the wheel eh ? Nothing against JomSocial and its team, but that's my 2 cents breakdown opinion. Going ahead, some session were going about Joomla Security and how to apply it to your sites and backing it up using Akeeba Backup Pro. I however, could not get the frameworks out of my head, I was already thinking nothing other than the frameworks.

Ryan asking us to contribute to the development of Joomla 1.7 onwards...

The event ended with a bomb with Ryan Ozimek giving his full powered shouts and that sums it up. I really regret not having the chance to take a photo with him( I was never a photogenic dude anywayz) but to miss a chance to have a photo with the President of Open Source Matters.org is a regret I have to live with for the rest of my life. Hopefully he does come down again for the next Joomla Day Malaysia 2013 ? Who knows ?

Till next time..

P/S : Not forgetting Yusof Firdaus, Omar Mahdzan and Neyra who made the event extremely fun. Thanks for the company guys. There's nothing more fun like knowing a few bloggers along the way...