On Saturday I joined in on the first ever Swiss Joomladay in Luzern. As I stated in my previous post the Joomla!days are great events, the Swiss Joomla!day is no exception on this! I arrived on Friday evening, evading a French strike and was welcomed by the Swiss Joomla!day team (Pete Coutts, Rafael Steinhöfel and Christiane Viatte). I joined with Leo Unglaub and Ivo Apostolov and where visiting the music group where Pete does perform (he actually is a good drummer). I had to wear ear protection because of the impressive sound of the drums, the image presented is the actual costumes his group use when they perform during carnaval.

After a very short sleep we got up pretty early (5:45 am) and traveled from Basel to Luzern, setting up the Joomla!day. I was asked to give two presentations in the morning, and in the evening we would have a panel discussion with the community members and the people who gave the presentations on the Joomla!day. My first presentation had the following title: "Joomla! 1.5 and roadmap to future versions". Part of this presentation was already given by me during the Dutch Joomla!day in April, but the specific details about Joomla! 1.6 where certainly new. The most interesting new parts I was telling about are the planned Access Control List (ACL) feature, the improved updater and the code re-factory to E-STRICT.

During the second sessions I handled "Joomla! security". I basically followed the Joomla! security checklist on the documentation wiki, but given the time I basically handled the highlights. The reason I choose to do a session about Joomla! security is because this topic pops up a lot lately, leading to some intense debates. I started with finding the answer if "Is Joomla! secure?" and "Is the world wide websafe?". The best way I could compare Joomla! security was with comparing it with having unsafe-sex. When you don't take pre-cautions you could end up with a serious disease, with Joomla! security in general it's the same. Without taking pre-cautions you risk getting your site compromised. For people who are interested in the actual presentations, I advise them to just follow the links in this article. Also notice the several links in the presentation that are crucial for making your site secure. A good piece of documentation to start is the Joomla! security checklist.

The afternoon session was with the team of presenters, which was moderated by Hagen Graf (author of several Joomla! related books). We received several question on different topics. Something that is really amazing is the amount of team spend on the project, varying from 10 till 30-40 hours! I also received the obvious question when we will release Joomla! 1.6 and how future versions of Joomla! would look like. I was joking around about Joomla! 5.0 and explained how the development cycle will look like. Starting with an Alpha (feature complete, but API still can change), Beta (feature complete, API frozen) and release candidate (features frozen, API frozen, stabilisation).

I had a great day, the Joomla!day was organized in a very professional way...I ended up eight memory sticks (all with Joomla! 1.5.7 pre-installed, yes I need to upgrade), some Joomla! t-shirts, a Joomla! sweater and new friends. I am honored to have been part of this first ever Swiss Joomla!day and want to thank Pete, Rafael and Christiane for inviting me.