ResMania - The Advanced Reservation System Framework

Labelled as the International Joomla! Conference, it truely was, with attendees from pretty much all over the world. The Greeks did very well winning several awards; Nicolas K. Dionysopoulus of AkeebaBackup winning a J.O.S.C.A.R. Award, also, Joomlaworks won an award for K2. Then France's Emmanuel Danan won the award for Joomla! Innovation of the Year for FlexiContent. Before I continue with this blog I would like to say congratulations to Brian Teeman and Johan Janssens for the excellant presentation of this event, with buckets of charisma and humour, 10/10 for a great show guys!

For more info on all the winners at J and Beyond, read here: http://jandbeyond.org. Congratulations to all the award winners - some pretty awesome talents out there!

Just 3 weeks after the CMS Expo in Chicago, J and Beyond was a definite date in the Joomla calendar, so over to Germany I went - this time as a visitor and not an exhibitor, to meet other developers, business owners, Joomla! enthusiasts and more, to discuss how other use Joomla in business and for different operations.

My first impression was that this event was pretty much all "central" Joomla conributors and developers allot that started with Joomla back in the Mambo days and have followed this CMS since. These people are not just people that work with Joomla but also have a real passion for it and it's history. They care about where Joomla is going and how it gets there.

As an attendee I had time to visit some of the talks at the event, I would cover all these sessions, but a couple that really stood out are:-

While this wasn't really a session, I would like to mention Ryan Ozimek's keynote speach, this was a fantastic keynote that really highlighted Joomla now and where this platform is going. Ryan is doing a great job visiting the community and listening to the feedback.. well done to Ryan!

The Tienda developers workshop by Rafael Diaz-Tushan of dioscouri.com, I'm a big fan of the dioscouri products and have used and implemented many of their extensions. Their extensions are easy to understand and they provide many essential tools for developing and running your Joomla site/s.

I had met Michel van Agtmaal at the CMS expo in Chicago but did not have time to attend his presentation. This was a very interesting session on user support, this raised several interesting points from other attendees and was interesting and informative. Open Source Support desk provide a one-stop shop for Joomla support and can provide Joomla and third party extension support.

Finally a mention to Kristoffer Sandven from Joomlablogger.com for the great blog on this event and thanks to Robert Deutz for the organisation of this event.

Joomla! Rocks!

... So does ResMania ;-)

The CMS Expo in Chicago brought together a gathering of skills providers, speakers and a chance for us to show off ResMania. For anyone interested, this annual event is now in it's 4th year and choosing to attend didn't let us down! I will cover some of the area's of this event and some of the people and providers and new friend we met here.

I had decided sometime ago that releasing ResMania had to be a special event as we have worked really hard, and for a long time, and had an expectation to release a great new application from our existing customers so, myself, along with the project's lead PHP developer, Valentin Shchitov, off we went to the Expo to release and announce our new application!

And the response was awesome! People were impressed by our implementation of our AJAX administration console, ease of use, and our application/framework design allowing us to create a connector and module/plugin for any PHP based CMS (that has itʼs own extension/module system).

While many were interested in the way we could provide CMS independence others were interested in our module system and how our system can handle different unit types, different pricing models and how it will be applied to their own or customers businesses.

We plan on releasing RC1 for property rentals at the end of May, and shortly after the Vehicle reservation system (with hourly prices will follow). Of course, we will be adding several different pricing modules with various pricing schemas allowing the administrator to simply install, enable and assign the desired pricing module to the unit type.

While we were at the Expo we were very impressed by some of the other exhibitors, not only for the quality of their products or services but also their enthusiasm for this industry. So, the next part of this article I will breakdown into sections, best Joomla extensions 2009, Getting Joomla Support and Joomla hosting with 1-click installation and other highlights...

Best App Developer and Best Joomla Extensions 2009

Merav Knafo from iJoomla provided some very interesting usability testing sessions which explained and demonstrated how to provide cost effective, high yield testing of your site. iJoomla was awarded best extension provider 2009, and if you are not familiar with iJoomla they provide several must-have extensions for Joomla (several which we use for Webformatique.com and ResMania.com) More information on iJoomla products can be found here: http://ijoomla.com

Another winner of best Joomla extension/application for 2009 was JomSocial, Shawn Fields is Marketing Director.

JomSocial is a great application for providing social networking functionality on your own Joomla site. Itʼs really a very nice application that will encourage your community to grow. Watch out for integration between JomSocial and ResMania with a special ResMania-JomSocial Module. More information about JomSocial can be found here: http://www.jomsocial.com/

Getting Joomla Support

I know from experience that people need support (even the professionals need help from time-to-time!) and I was really impressed by Open Source Support Desk (https://www.opensourcesupportdesk.com) whoʼs CEO is Michel van Agtmaal. They provide a friendly, professional, tried and tested solution for Users needing support for Joomla and third party applications. So, if need support Open Source Support Desk can surely help and the costs and terms are flexible to suit your requirements.

Joomla Hosting with 1-Click

Cloudaccess.net are the hosting company of joomla.org and they provide cloud installations of Joomla which, not only offers high availability because it is in the cloud but the setup of this is a 1-click, simple and quick installation. Cloudaccess.net can provide all your hosting requirements and it's not as expensive as you might think for a true business hosting solution checkout http://cloudaccess.net.

A Great Place to Start!

Shackpacks for education establishments are very popular Eduardo Tabush told me from Joomlashack.com. These Shackpacks for schools include template other goodies so you can get your Joomla website up and running and save hours of time. Joomlashack produce many high quality Joomla solutions from professional easy to use templates to user training at Joomlashack University. Joomlashack University is a great resouce for people starting out with Joomla. Check http://joomlashack.com for more info.

The Lucky Apple iPad Winner

To celebrate the launch of ResMania we gave away an Apple iPad, the competition was opened in April on our website and the lucky winner was drawn on the 5th May at the CMS Expo. I am please to announce that the lucky winner was Grant Wittstruck of Colorado

Congratulation Grant!

Finally a quick mention to the organizers of this event. I would recommend this event for any CMS user, vendors and service providers. It starts as a learning experience but definitely becomes far more by connecting people together.

Many Many Thanks to John and Linda Coonen