Multi-lingual content manager for Joomla! - Nooku

The Nooku team was at the Joomladays in the Netherlands last week, both as sponsors and as speakers. The Dutch Joomladays are traditionally one of the biggest Joomla events globally, and this year was no different. Organised by Guido Jansen, the driving force of Dutch community site, the event hosted some 300 attendees and over 20 speakers, spread over two days.

Free Software is about Freedom

The Nooku team gave three presentations. The first was a keynote by Johan Janssens, titled 'Why freedom makes a better business model'. Johan has gained quite some experience with the business side of free open source software, both free as in beer (as Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5, DOCman 1.3, and Nooku Framework) and free as in freedom (Nooku Content, the multilingual extension). The presentation discussed some of these experiences as well as existing open source business models such as 'the beekeeper'.

Nooku Content

The second presentation was about our multilingual extension, which always draws a crowd. We have renamed it to Nooku Content, because it's growing to be more than 'just' multilingual. The SEF URL and search engine optimisation features alone are a good reason to install Nooku Content, even on monolingual sites. As usual, Johan explained the basics first, followed by a demo by Mathias showing of some of the goodies.

Nooku Framework

The second day was very exciting, as it saw the launch of the new Nooku Framework -- "an alien life form that grows inside Joomla and makes it better", as one of our partners called it.

Apparently there were already some rumours going around, as someone came up to us when we arrived and asked us if it was true that you can create a complete working Joomla 1.5/MVC component using only a database table, a bit of html and a single line of code. Of course we told him to wait and see. So what do you think? Is it possible? Tweet using the #nooku hashtag.

Johan explained the features and the philosophies behind Nooku Framework, and the reason for building a new rapid application development platform for Joomla. After that, Mathias showed some live coding examples. The crowd was very enthusiastic -- many of them have already signed up for code access.

Doctor Joomla

Surprisingly, one of the most fun things was the Doctor Joomla sessions. The Nooku Team, as well as some of the other speakers and attending Joomla experts, where available in the afternoon to answer any question people had. This is the closest any Joomla user can get to so much expertise. People dropped by with questions ranging from newbie stuff, over template design, to development questions, and the Doctors made sure everyone got the most suitable expert to solve his issue.

We'd like to thank the organisation, everyone who attended our presentations, and the Nooku Partners who joined us for the event.