In honor of Joomla's 4th birthday, the Joomla User Group New England had a cake and sang happy birthday!

Joomla Day New England was a resounding success!

Thank you all so much for your helpful feedback. In general, comments were very positive. We're thinking about next year's event already. If you haven't signed up for our user group yet, be sure you register for our mailing list so that you'll be first to know when we get next year's event scheduled, or any other Joomla events coming up in our area.

Relevant links that will be useful for you:

• Photos of the event (Thanks, Doug Patac, for doing these for us!)
• Elin's review of Joomla Day at Joomla.org
• Mitch Pirtle's slides from his extensions talk
  
• Barb Ackemann's resources for creating Joomla templates
  
• Barrie North's slides from Black Belt Joomla
  

Podcasts of talks

• Jen's opening remarks
  
  
• Mitch Pirtle: KickApps
  
• Barrie North: Black Belt Joomla
  
• Barb Ackemann: Beginning Joomla Templates
  
• Jen Kramer: Advanced Joomla Templates
  
• Mitch Pirtle: Joomla Extension Development
  
• Elin Waring: Why Open Source Matters
  
• Rob Schley: Joomla 1.6
  
• Jen's final remarks
  

Congratulations, Andy Tarr!

Andy was just chosen for the 2009 Google Summer of Code project, working on Joomla's administrator templates for Joomla 1.6. She'll be working on making those templates accessible as well as functional.  Read more on Joomla's site.

There were 147 applications with only 18 students chosen for this prestigious honor.

Andy is a student in the Master's of Science in Information Technologies (MSIT) at the Marlboro College Graduate Center. She also runs Tarr Consulting.

We are so proud of Andy! Congratulations!

Here are some Moodle notes from our meeting:

Here is an example of Moodle integrated into Joomla!  http://www.sunspotgraphics.com/promoodle/

A Joomla! website, with a Moodle course management system, integrated as "Pro Moodle" http://promoodle.com/

• Moodle’s open-source code is freely available at download.moodle.org. 

• Moodle documentation wiki that is available at docs.moodle.org

• Free software, community, information: moodle.org

• Commercial support and other services: moodle.com

• Statistics: http://moodle.org/stats

LATEST MOODLE TEST SITE
http://test.moodle.org/1.9/

SAMPLE SITES:
http://www.crteacher.com/

DEMO SITE:
http://demo.moodle.org/

THEMES:
http://theme.classroomrevolution.com/

integrated Joomla and Moodle using JFusion component
http://ymis.suqld.org.au/

We opened registration for Joomla Day New England on March 4, 2009, to our immediate user group. We then started advertising on March 6.

By March 22, we had hit 100 registrants on the site. We recently decided to accept 10 more participants - just in case a few people decided not to show. Due to space limitations, we can't take more participants than this.

How did we get so many registrants so quickly? How did we manage to pull together the event in just a few short months -- we only decided to hold a Joomla Day at our January 21 user group meeting?

Here's a few tips and tricks from Joomla User Group New England!

Photo Gallery Show Down

The Photo Gallery Show Down at the March 2009 New England Joomla! User Group meeting was full of great information.  Some of our User Group members showed the various photo galleries they have used in their Joomla! sites.

Joomla Day New England: Latest News

Do join us on May 30, 2009, 9 AM to 4 PM, at the Marlboro College Graduate Center (MCGC) in Brattleboro, Vermont. The cost will be $45.

Our speaker list includes:

• Mitch Pirtle, VP of Development, KickApps
• Rob Schley, Joomla Core Team Member and Open Source Matters Vice President
  
• Elin Waring, Open Source Matters President 
• Barrie North, JoomlaShack/SimplWeb/Compass Designs and MCGC faculty
• Barb Ackemann, Iris Lines Designs and MCGC faculty
• Jen Kramer McKibben, 4Web Inc. and MCGC faculty

Breakfast and lunch are included, and there will be a bunch of giveaways at the end of the day. Only 100 slots available, so register early!

Visit us at newengland.joomladayusa.org!

Joomla Day New England, May 30, 2009: Save the Date!

We are making good progress to planning our Joomla Day.

At our January Joomla User Group meeting, we decided to organize a Joomla Day. We meet in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the Marlboro College Graduate Center. They donate space for our meeting, and they offer a great class on Joomla to graduate and undergraduate students.  As I teach at the Grad Center and run the user group, I asked them if they'd be willing to support a Joomla Day event at a time of mutual convenience. Not only did I get an enthusiastic response, they even volunteered to donate the space for the conference.

Next, I asked the group if this is something we'd want to do, and again, we had a very enthusiastic response.

I was thrilled, but I'm not going to organize the whole thing myself! 

Group Website

Your group needs a website. Spring for a URL. They're only $8.95 at GoDaddy.

You should probably build that website in Joomla since, after all, you're a Joomla user group. There's plenty of other alternatives like Ning, or Wordpress.com, or plain old static pages. But you could also use SimplWeb, which is, in fact, a Joomla installation, if you have trouble installing Joomla on your own.