OSTraining at the Joomla World Conference

In November, several of the OSTraining team headed to Cancun, Mexico

We were there for the 3rd annual Joomla World Conference. To my knowledge, this was the first major open source conference to take place in Latin America. The whole conference was bi-lingual, with translators constantly on hand and many presentations given in Spanish.

The whole event took place at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico.

Thanks to this photo from Thomas Hunziker, you can tell that the conference was really hard work:

5 members of OSTraining flew to Cancun. Here’s the team from left-to-right.

• Bill (developer)
• Eddie (finance)
• Steve (CEO)
• Rod (trainer)
• Valentin (designer)

Every morning, Peter Bui from JoomlaBe.at organized yoga sessions on the beach. Thanks to Pierre Sempe‘s photo, you can see Rod on the left and Steve on the right:

Valentin gave a talk in Spanish on designing Joomla templates. His talk was called “Protostar Como Framework”, or “How to use Protostar as a Framework”:

Steve gave a talk on building membership sites, focused on the lessons we’d learned from growing ostraining.com and from building Simple Renew:

One of the highlights for me was Sander Potjer’s closing presentation. Sander is one of the people I respect most in Joomla. He gave a rousing presentation and at the end, asked everyone to take a selfie. For about 30 minutes, our Twitter streams were full of selfies from conference attendees:

All in all, the Joomla World Conference was a lot of fun. I’m going to leave the final words with Valentin, who is from Mexico, and was also attending his first Joomla event.

Valentin’s thoughts

“Joomla World Conference 2014 was the first Joomla event I attended. I had the opportunity to meet some of the OSTraining team members that traveled from United States and Guatemala. We had a fun time discussing ideas about the future of the company and sharing what keep us motivated in our daily work. At this point I must confess OSTraining feels like a family because the focus of everything we do as a company is based on enjoying the process.

Joomla is a great CMS that I like to use in my job, something even better is see in person the reactions of an important part of the community that truly enjoys, learns and shares the passion for creating websites based on this powerful CMS. It’s something that’s worth seeing if you have the opportunity to attend JWC in future.

My favorite moment was after the closing keynote when my friend Juan Carlos gave a Mexican flag to Dianne Henning to say thanks for being an important part of the Joomla World Conference.”

Thanks to Pierre for this photo also: