The last time I visited Spain was for the Joomla!Day 2008 in Madrid. During this event I was already impressed of the commitment the Spanish community has for the Joomla project and the attitude they have towards open source. The social aspects of the project and the community efforts are clearly visible as well. Some serious sponsors have made the event in 2008 possible.

When I stepped into the room this year one of the first things I recognized was the poster with the sponsors of the event. Not extremely prominent more like understatement. However this post was pretty huge and it was packed with sponsors. There had been at least 20 companies, individuals, agencies and other non-profit organizations mentioned on this poster. Some of them I recalled from last year and many, many new. Javier Ballester came to me and thanked me and Chris that we encouraged him so much last year. I didn’t quite got what he was talking about in the beginning but then he explained. He visited the JoomlaDay in 2008 and our commitment, explanations and information as well as all the additional experience of his Joomla community convinced that Joomla is the CMS of choice and that he can build up a business on it. So he did and in the last 15 month he got so successful that he is now a sponsor for this year Joomladay and with this giving back the favor he got last time.

The whole team of Joomla Spanish Association, especially Javier, Jordi, Pedro, Laura, Franck, Juan, Jonathan, Pilar and all those I don’t remember the name anymore, made this event really outstanding. I was told that here had been about 30 people which even persuaded Johan to help setting up the room, batches and all other things needed. On Friday the event split into three locations focusing on template development/design, extension development and business solutions. On Saturday the event was organized in one single room having about 150 people listening to great talks about the organization of Joomla, solutions and very pragmatic examples of good extensions. Two life translators made it able for the audience to understand the English talks from Johan, Lorenz and me as well enabled us to understand their questions.

The community is already planing the next Joomla!Day within April 2010 in Mallorca and if it goes well I would say they can even have two Joomladay's in 2010 easily. It’s really great to see how the community is transferring “all together” to their own cultural situation and evolves to come together in all their different regional groups. I’m really looking forward to the next events.

If you want to know more please visit:
http://www.joomladay.es
https://twitter.com with #jd09es (English) and #joomladay2009bcn (spanish)
https://forum.joomla.org