JoomlaDay Australia 2019 Wrap-up

23 August 2019

JoomlaDay Australia 2019 took place at the State Library of Queensland in sunny Brisbane on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th August.

Speakers and attendees arrived from around Australia and overseas for the packed schedule of presentations and workshops on Joomla! and associated technologies and business processes.

Highlights from across the weekend included the keynote speech on collaborative solutions by Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia and #NotMyDebt website founder, Lyndsey Jackson. 

Platinum Sponsors, Tiny, demonstrated the TinyMCE 5 editor experience and how to develop custom plugins. And Tiny's California-based Marketing Director, Robert Collings, shared his 10 Marketing Hacks to Grow Business. 

George Wilson from the Joomla 4 Development Team provided an update from London via Skype on the development status, future features and upgrade path for Joomla 4.  

And Joomla co-founder, Shayne Bartlett spoke about the need to maintain a GDPR compliant web presence and on how to provide high availability instances of Joomla with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Joomla for Beginners sessions with Britt Ambrose and Tim Plummer proved popular. And congratulations to Shani Ganter, who became Australia's newest Joomla Certified Administrator sitting and passing her exam on the weekend.

JoomlaDay Australia also saw the announcement of the inaugural Joomla Australia Site Awards for 2019, as judged by a panel of international experts. Well done to the winners in the various design and user experience categories and to the team at Mity Digital whose website won the "Best Overall" category.

JoomlaDay Australia 2019 would not have been possible without the much-appreciated effort of the organising committee. Nor, without the support of generous sponsors:

• Platinum: Tiny
• Gold: cPanel
• Silver: Mity Digital
• Bronze: Marketing Rocket, Themexpert, Joomla-Monster, J2Store, JoomShaper, RSJoomla, JoomlaShine
• Supporters: OPN 365, Template Creator, Linux Australia, WebSolutionZ, BizzDesign, All Things Web, JoomlaShack 

And a big thanks to Mity Digital for sponsoring the networking event on Saturday night.

After a positive weekend, the big question at the closing Town Hall panel session was, Will there be a JoomlaDay next year? The response from the potential Melbourne organisers was, Yes. But as with all things Joomla, it will depend on volunteers. Please get in touch if you would like to help with future JoomlaDay Australia events.