This past weekend I attended the Hungarian Joomla! Day, and it was an amazing experience. The Hungarian community started in 2006 with a "forum party," and the first Joomla!day was organized in 2007. The Joomla! Day was organized by the Joomla! User Association Hungary. From experience I know that organizing such an event is a lot of work. This year's event event was organized by Tibor Tóth, Annamari Bán and József Tamás Herczeg, and they created a very professional event with an interesting program.

Around 100 people came to the Joomla! Day that was fully sold out. The program started with a presentation of Szabolcs Bán from the Free Software Foundation Hungary entitled "Introduction to the World of Free Software". After the initial session Tibor explained in non-techno-geek terms why people should look for MVC aware extensions. Both sessions where given in Hungarian so the details were a mystery for me ;-)

After the break Johan Janssens gave a presentation about Search Engine optimization and what you can do to get a good ranking in search engines. After the lunch Sándor Nagy, a representant of the Hungarian government, explained how the government is looking at implementation of open source. Johan then had a second session about his multi-lingual extension. The day ended with a session about the use of openid by Zoltán Gyurkó.

I was asked to end the day with an "ask whatever you want to ask" session. My personal experience is that at the end of a conference day everyone is getting pretty tired, so I decided to ask everyone to make a circle, so I would not end up in front-of the attendees but being in the middle...this for sure woke everyone up :-P The first question was: "When will ACL be included in Joomla!"...I was joking around that I never had this question before. I explained that this feature will be included in 1.6 but there is no date set for the release of a beta or release candidate. We promised to send an update as soon as possible on the status of version 1.6. A series of questions where asked: "Will a cron feature be added in the core?", "Can JED search options be improved?", "How do you make a living?", "If there are great extensions out there, will they be included in the core?...just too much for this blog post.

I ended my session with an announcement of the end-of-life moment of Joomla! 1.0.x. I will share the details of this announcement in a separate blog to make this news official. The Hungarian community is a great example of what this project is all about, great inspiring people. Tibor had a big surprise for Johan and me. We where granted life time membership to the Hungarian User Association as honoured members. I always feel privileged to be invited to Joomla!days, but this really is one of the biggest presents I have received since I joined the Joomla! community. I am honoured, proud and consider myself extremely lucky with my visit to this great Joomla! Day.

On the picture you see (from left to right) Annamari, Tibor, myself and Tamás. I am showing the official paper with my life time membership, it will have a prominent place in my home!