Dutch Joomla! 1.6 Bootcamp
Tuesday, 17 August 2010On August 5th 2010 (one week ago) we held a Joomla! 1.6 Bootcamp in the Netherlands. The Dutch day was ment for implementors, webdesigners and webdevelopers who want to see what has changed in Joomla! 1.6 Bootcamp and how to migrate. All our guys gave presentations on various topics - some technical, some very technical. Here's a short review.
Brief introduction on Joomla! 1.6
The bootcamp started with an overview of all new features. Without loosing time with the new backend-design and which button was moved where, the presentation was focussing on the new features that mattered: The introduction of unlimited categories, the drop of PDF-support, the removal of various third party libraries (like tcpdf), the hosting requirements, etcetera.
After this, a short discussion was started on how to migrate. Joomla! 1.6 is still very much in beta, and while there is already an excellent migration tool available, an actual migration is probably only useful once a good amount of Joomla! extensions is made compatible with 1.6.
Giving you ACLs
The most important presentation of the day seemed to be on ACLs - mainly because it is the Joomla! feature everybody seems to be waiting for. Sander gave not only an overview of what possibilities ACL are bringing along, but went into detail by explaining the setup of ACLs, and how to stack ACL rules on top of each other.
Using various practical scenarios it became appearant that implementing ACLs is not easy, and requires a lot of abstract thinking to get things done. Simple tasks might actually be very complicated, and before you know it, the site is made to complex - or even worse: You might be locked out. With Sanders presentation the ACL theory was made understandable.
At the end of the day, Hans and Jisse gave presentations on templating and programming - primarily pointing to code changes (both XML-code as PHP-code) - and with that, give all the tips and tricks to migrate a Joomla! template or Joomla! extension to Joomla! 1.6.
Mixing the bootcamp with Yireo
While the bootcamp was organized through our Dutch entity, we hope to mix up the knowledge in Yireo tutorials (and extensions). Preparing for the bootcamp involved a lot of research, and - while we hope to organize a second Dutch Joomla! 1.6 Bootcamp in the neat future - another goal is to publish new tutorials on Joomla! 1.6 in the upcoming months. Stay tuned.