Joomla World Gathered in Boston

Even though it’s freezing here in Boston, what kept us warm during the last weekend, apart from the really cool RedComponent swag hats, was the great community feeling that was all around Joomla World Conference 2013! The high quality of the event organization, the wide mix of the topics, the great speakers and the opportunity to meet so many of our favorite #jpositive people made us very happy to be there. We felt even prouder that SiteGround contributed to such an outstanding event by being its main sponsor.

Impressive Organization

• The event was held at Harvard University – a really great venue.
• There was live streaming of the main lectures – very cool thing, according to me
• The WiFi connection was the fastest and most stable I have ever seen at an event
• The keynotes are already available on the official Joomla video channel

I think this is the right place to say a special thank you to all the organisers and especially to…all of them: Martijn Boomsma, Jerri Christiansen, Mike Carson, T J Baker, Jon Neubauer, Victor Drover, Dianne Henning and Ronni Christiansen! Those guys did a really great job and turned JWC13 into one of the best organized conferences I’ve been at.

Great speakers and talks

The schedule was really diverse. There were more than 80 talks during the three days of the conference: three keynotes each day, attended by all the people, and up to seven different talks going on simultaneously on each time slot that was not reserved for a keynote. So there was definitely an impressive amount of knowledge shared during the event. From the talks I managed to attend I would definitely remember:

• If you have missed the event and have time to see just one thing, I would recommend you watch the Joomla Ignite session. It combines a series of a dozen 5-minutes talks by Joomla people from all over the world. With themes ranging from personal motivation stories and practical security advice to revolutionary for the Joomla community ideas like introducing paid leadership to the project, the Ignite session will give you a great feeling about the vibes in the community.
• Of course being a big Star Trek fan myself, I could not have missed the Rod Martin’s keynote inspired by this legendary series. Not only it was pure fun but there were quite some good points on how to do a successful business.
• The historical appearance of Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress co-founder, which told the story of WordPress since its creation till today is also something I would recommend.
• My other personal favorite topic is security, because it is very much related to what we do as a Joomla host, so no wonder SiteGround mastermind Tenko Nikolov himself talked on the subject and I did not miss what Brian Teeman had to say on the subject too.

Re-charged by the #jpositive

One of the greatest things in this years JWC for us was the chance to meet so many Joomla people and to feel their positive attitude towards SiteGround as well. We talked to many people at the SiteGround booth and the majority of them were coming to tell us they were already using our hosting services and were really happy with their website performance, which was extremely recharging for the whole team. It was great to meet in person with Brian O’Dowd, who got a ticket for JWC13 from us; Joseph Campbell, who apart from being our customer also won the crowd at the Joomla! Ignite talk; Peter Bui from Joomlabe.at, who is really passionate about so many things, including SiteGround (he even wore SiteGround shoes) and so many more. Although this was my first Joomla event, I felt among long-time friends and it was great!

Final thoughts

I’m sure that Joomla World Conference 2013 was a great experience for every participant. There was something for everybody – both technical and business people. It was organized by a bunch of very passionate people and all of us that were in there felt that great Joomla passion!