Exciting meeting of London's Joomla User Group

I had the pleasure of attending my first-ever Joomla User Group meeting at University College London yesterday. The minor drizzle in the evening did not dampen the enthusiasm of the attendees who were all passionate about Joomla. It turned out to a lively session of two hours where a lot of insights were parted by the members.

We had a presentation on Joomla performance tuning which covered all the aspects from caching, compression, CSS and Javascript minification, MySql tuning and image servers. A suggestion that serving images from a different server speeds up the page download as the HTTP traffic becomes parallelized was particularly good. Also the warning that many image-bloated templates and sub-optimal extensions are the main culprit in reducing performance was welcome.

A lively discussion followed on extensions. The two most memorable ones for me were Alpha Content and Store Locator. The former provided a directory listing of articles in a category in an alphabetic manner and gave A-Z index on top to navigate easily to any content beginning with that letter. The latter gave a Google Map of Excel-loaded interest-points (they could be stores or individuals) to easily zoom in at their location or associated URL.

There were a host of other useful insights and this brief introduction does slight injustice to the meeting. I would suggest that if you are interested in Joomla then make your way to the next meeting on15th of March at 7.00pm.