I attended my first Joomla Day with about 80 other Joomla afficionados, addicts, newbies and other interested souls who were prepared to give up their Saturday in favour of learning more about Joomla and meeting other like minded people.

With a mix of experienced users to complete newbies attending the day's fare was a mixed bag of Joomla basics and technical presentations with the presentation on Joomla security by co-organiser Brendon Hatcher of BrilliantWeb probably the most actively participated session, especially in the light of recent Joomla hack-attacks.

I did a presentation about Internet marketing with Joomla that got off to such a nervous start that I was worried that I wouldn't be able to use my full time allocation. Fortunately, participation pick up the session wasn't a total flop.

Other presentations included

• an overview of Virtuemart - Bernard Esterhuyse, Wooza Shop
• Joomla Templating - Maarten Jongman, boo2 web design, and
• case studies by co-organiser Matthew Philogene, Raramuri Design and Eugene van Zyl, Real Estate Solutions via Skype from Cape Town

While the presentations offered varied benefits, depending on one's level of experience, the main benefit to me of a day like this is making contact and sharing experiences with people in similar and complimentary businesses, especially as working in the Internet industry can be a lonely and isolated affair.

And for this reason alone, attending a Joomla Day is a worthwile experience. Find out about a Joomla event near you.

Register with Joomla SA Portal for future Joomla events in South Africa

Some useful resources mentioned at Joomla Day Johannesburg:

• Lazybackup - Send a daily backup of the database in a zipped file to one or multiple emails
• Payfast - A South African easy online EFT system
• CSV Improved - the import/export tool for VirtueMart.
• Fabrik - Joomla Application Builder
• Joomlapack - AJAX powered backup and restore