Joomla! Users Group Boston

Boston Joomla Users Group Meeting
Dec. 16, 2009 at the Cyber Cafe in Malden, MA

Okay, so here's a summary, but please remember, I'm just a piano player! And a Joomla beginner, so bear with me. I just happen to type a gazillion words per minute and caught a lot of this evening's discussion. It was fantastic, you see, because from my point of view, I met this great group of people, and they all use Joomla, the same content management system I use for my websites. This was only my second meeting; each time it was fun and I learned some interesting things.

The mission of the group goes back to its history. In Boston, there was a lot of Drupal stuff, and the city seemed to need a group to spread the word that Joomla is also a good platform. Our users' group's aim is educational, although it's not (yet) officially a non-profit. We would like to pursue Bootcamps & Workshops...if we can develop enough of an organizational core. Or, we could umbrella under an entity who is a non-profit, then charge for these offerings. We then may have to take ourselves much more seriously, perhaps become a 501 3C - a real organization, board of directors, file 990 at end of yr...but to do this, we need a core group of people who can do the work.

First we can do incremental things to test out whether we actually want to take those steps. Then, over several years, we can work toward those type of goals. For instance, we could do a presentation at a conference. This group has been around for two years, and if we regularly present each year...501 tech club...we can build a reputation. Claire says...start getting an agenda, get more people involved and being responsible for various things, so it's not falling all on one person.

Vivek - Scott - We need to think of a content strategy for OUR website. Put a couple of paragraphs in the blog section for that meeting, then we've captured it. Then our website starts to have a lot more content & give people access to what we do, how we do it, and how to get involved. Joomla forms can be used in a similar way. We can put up slides and materials from presentations. Post a message on the front page that they are available & link to them, so folks interested in various topics can find them.

You can write an article about the meeting, what was said at the meeting, what things caught your eye. If you're interested in the Joomla aspect, that's all you need...some people are new, some experienced...then doing so actually makes it friendly to various people w/varying levels of experience w/Joomla. (Obviously, I'm writing this...which should be proof of this. Beginners should not feel intimidated.)

How about things we could do on development side, that would be calling cards for us? Simplest thing: create a BosJomUG template - talk about what we want that template to do. We notice that others, like Joomlashack, build functionality into them. Just like other free templates, we could put in little details nobody ever thought about....like some templates that have no header block, etc. We can make our template different from what other people have done.The template is a collaborative project. Components, modules, plugins can also be.

Think: What can we create? That there's no Joomla thing...like there's JExtSurvey, a new survey tool, multi page for small non-profit BUT you have to be a registered user. To TAKE the survey you have to be a registered user.

Visual aspects of site...this needs some work. But, the simple clean look is great. Projects manager - we need. Others like Ken, video and Scott, development. We could devote, say a half hour in each meeting to that project... A Site Manager - Vivek? in charge of developing template for the site...can be more than one person...

Blogging
User Management
Mailing List
...we already have. Beyond that, we have to figure out what else.

Blogging - general Joomla topics - Vivek can write one blog piece a month. Screen shots, make it useful. Blogging is story telling environment. If you've done a project, and can say, look how it empowered the organization you did it for...etc. that's great material for the blog, if Joomla had a big part in that...newspapers might be interested in it too. Claire says, how about a blog post on how to find things on Joomla's wiki...Bob Sprague - is a writer...lots of volunteers here for blogging! How to start a blog topic? Once you log in, there is an option. Login, then on the HOME PAGE (for now), in the R sidebar, click on "post to the blog."

Vivek says, like LinkedIn or Facebook,we need a notification, or some way that tells everyone in our group, hey there's an activity...Then, if something catches your eye, then you go in...

Scott says, there's also an outreach piece, we do it through the website, but it doesn't go out consistently to places it probably should. Publicity thing can be done each month. Think: What lists could I post this to? What other orgs would be interested in it?

Webinar...interesting way...
DimDim
Skype video
Scott - a telepresence project...they'd love to engage w/a group like us to try it out...
Document what you do, simply ---
Project management - Jordan does a lot of development, and John Kirby (does business w/Vivek) would probably be into that.

Scott & Vivek - site managers, Vivek can help w/template. We can post this slate on the forum, and vote on them. The site had an incomplete template, Vivek wanted plain...it looks nice and clean. Once people start adding stuff, we'll appreciate its uncluttered look. The two RSS feed modules were not good, Scott didn't migrate them...it looks different now.

People generally DON'T KNOW the difference between Drupal and Joomla. We can help people understand the differences. Also, help them understand how WordPress is not primarily a content management system. (Plone, Drupal and Joomla depend on money & budget, their main difference. Unless you have a specific technical requirement that Joomla can't satisfy, Joomla is a great choice. Plone is often used to connect network to network on a grand scale, and is expensive. NOSI, the Nat Open Source Institute did a report on these differences, Claire says. Learning curve is also a difference. Joomla takes the least time to learn. Architecture is another difference. The developers of Mambo (the predecessor of Joomla) thought about having an easy interface for site administrators, so Joomla is optimized for that.

In the early stages of Drupal, administration was terrible; only in recent versions is it user friendly. They throw around terms in nomenclature; instead of "categories," they use some other unfamiliar term, and people get really confused. Drupal was not a friendly environment, unless you really drink the koolaid. Also, it's not as good, if you want your client to "take ownership." Scott wants his clients to take over and to be the superadministrator, and once they're on their own, he gets out of it.

Deborah Finn gets our stuff, Scott just sends out the announcement. We need a Newsletter saying things other than when the next meeting is. We can post our active discussions on the forums in the newsletter, which could be sent a week or two before the meeting. Project management - Jordan (John Kirby?) Christian, the guy from Berkely might be interested, but hasn't been attending in a while...We could have one development topic talked about in every meeting...Regarding the member section of our website, Sam is a female, and to find her, if you're logged in as a member, it's best to put a photo on your profile...

Ken Susan Vivek - template development. Charles - Forum administrator

Scott thinks permissions need to be tweaked in a directory, so photo upload is not quite working yet.

Meeting managers - will they take some responsibility for organizing who will be presenting, or at least put out a call to let people know nobody is presenting? Knowing what you'll talk about in advance is great, then the group can publicize it. We can put out feelers, saying, these are the topics, and it might bring some more newbies into the meeting. When is our next meeting?...

3rd or 4th Wednesday - January 20th it is!
...Vivek LOVES making decisions!
...Strange putting the date there, Charles says...

1/20/2010 !!!

Vivek will make the Blog page a two column layout.
Scott says, the home page top menu doesn't drop down yet.
Scott used "flex header" for the header on the website, because then if you want to change it, you just go into a module and change it.

Claire says, regarding the State Department of Education parking lot across the street, there's one hour parking there during the day, but it's okay to park there at night.

Use DimDim screen sharing - a free video sharing tool.
Sam - in the red sweater...
lots of concepts got talked about in these meetings, great ideas, but then we forget about it the next month, because of the organization (or lack thereof). Sam says, it would be nice to have an open discussion for 20 mins or so.

People have access to the local computers here, if you wanted to have people use the computers here, there are all sorts of possibilities. They might be able to install XAMPP on them.

Scott breaks the news: 1.5 DocMan was just released a couple of days ago. Version 1.4 if you've worked with it, DocLink doesn't work! You had to use 1.04 rc3 to get a stable version that also worked with DocLink. Well, now DocLink works. You no longer have to upload a separate plugin for search on DocLink. It's completely compatible,
other plugins & modules should work. It's developers did a bug fix and cleaned it up, so it's really stable. They're planning on a 2.0 complete rewrite. Among DocMan's many advantages: user level management...controlling access...stable links you don't have to keep re-inserting.

Vivek uses Remository; he had given up on DocLink. What about user level management and groups? It does this, Vivek says. It's extensible, and you can add custom fields, so it has...custom functionality...DocMan had died a slow death, Vivek said. Scott says DocMan has now come back to life. With Remository, you can restrict the number of downloads per user. Also, a document can belong to multiple categories; DocMan could not do that, Remository can. Brampton, a one man team, is the developer. (DocMan Johann Manson now in Joomla core team...so DocMan team was not as energized...but now team is, once again.) SEO is another advantage of Remository, Vivek says. The amazing links it creates to files are basically site name/categoryname/title. So, its links is actually like a canonical link to your document...which is really good for SEO.

...BTW, another topic we can talk about-SEO
and ANALYTICS

Google Maps - tools are there, just over the horizon...using them to extend...you can Geocode your community builder. Say, create a map of town of Arlington, then attach data to each building you show on it. We should really have a forum category called "WEBSITE ISSUES" or SUPPORT.

Vivek says Jordan - had good ideas about the Forum; you start w/just 3 categories. Jordan again brought up - the domain name of the website. Where the heck did that come from? No wonder it was so hard to find one, Scott says. Jordan owns those domains - BostonJoomla.org! Since he owns it...we'll have to talk to him about that. We can reimburse him, or he can donate it...Especially if he's going to be our project organizer. He might have a good domain to point at a development site also, Scott says.

We've had a couple offers of hosting. Charles leases space from HostGator as a re-seller...it has CPanel - Scott points out, MySQL may have no db support...are they using MySQL 5....? Charles says they have it. Civic CRM...Whatever we have as a development platform should not have any glitches that prevent us from doing anything. Try that out as a test bed. Or, Jordan did offer as well..Scott made backups of the site (of course). There need to be backups (of course).

Claire mentions a blog about Avinash. He and 3 other social networking people ran a contest. The prize was 7 books, and Claire won!...how would you analyze my Twitter thing? She got the set of books...they're all autographed! Fluffing - or something like that, is the title of some new book that's out...

Vivek's formula:
BEST
Benchmarking
Segmenting
Trending
Testing

Avinash Kaushik...can follow on Twitter...
How would you measure the success of your company's social media efforts?

How many people engage?
new?
repeat?
frequency?
type of engagement...just checking a calendar, or asking questions?
nature of engagement - complements, requests...?

Twitter
who's retweeting you? Just retweeting, or are they adding to it?
# of followers
content of Tweets
categorize the content...look at that, too.

Avinash was the 1st one to find out the monetary value of each of his tweets. Each single tweet equals x amount of dollars, because it leads to a certain business thing...he knows how much each tweet is worth! Pretty amazing. Claire mentions more about blogging as a way to get all of their resource listings in one place that could be accessed from anywhere. Blogging Cafe - all needs to be retagged now...very long post..2005... resources, job stuff, etc. They created a job postings blog.

With all our enthusiasm, our meeting has gone overtime. It was a fantastic meeting, and now we are going home!