400 Joomla and Drupal Classes

Today is a day of celebration for OSTraining. Our first live class was in June 2008. Four years later, we’ve now taught 400 Joomla and Drupal classes.

How Did OSTraining Get to 400 Classes?

The germ of OSTraining was planted at the first CMS Expo in Chicago in May 2008, with a day of Joomla classes after the event.

I had a great time and went back to run a Joomla class in Atlanta the next month. We got lucky with an inspiring first group. 4 years later, some of those people are still heavy Joomla users.

Initially we grew because I got on an airplane and flew all around the US. It really wasn’t more complicated than booking a class in Seattle, Denver, San Francisco or Boston, trying to sell it and then jumping on a airplane.

Along the way, there were a lot of obstacles from the huge Chicago storm that dumped 10 feet of snow on the venue, to internet outages, fire alarms and 101 other things that threatened to interrupt classes.

Over time, I was able to work with local teachers. They’d come along and see a class, learn how we did things, and then start a local class of their own. We’ve got to 400 classes, because we’ve been fortunate to work with many great local teachers. From Vancouver to London and from Los Angeles to New York, here are some of the great teachers we’re saying thank you to:

• Aaron Hanford
• Bo Astrup
• Brian Teeman
• Cindy McCourt
• Cory Webb
• Ed Andrea
• Gabe Wahhabb
• Jen Kramer
• Joe Sonne
• JR Maroney
• Laura Gordon
• Peter Konstantakos
• Robbie Addair
• Rob Kowalski
• Rod Martin
• TJ Baker

During the last four years we’ve added Drupal classes, online training and books (very successfully) plus live WordPress training (less successfully).

But, no matter what we add next, the goal wil remain the same: to help as many people as possible use open source.

Thanks for all your support. Stay tuned, and if all goes well we’ll be here celebrating 1000 classes in 2018!