Amongst the attendees was varying levels of experience and skill with Joomla and the MJUG team presented material that was appropriate for everyone. Andrew Eddie gave us further details about the upcoming Joomla 1.6 release; while there’s no launch date yet it’s worth noting some of the features that were discussed. One of Joomla’s drawbacks (features?) is that there’s no clean way to define new usergroups with specific and access controls -  Joomla comes with 9 pre-defined user groups that provide a simple user structure right out of the box. But for administrators that need to fine-tune user access, they must work outside the Joomla core, likely utilising a third-party extension. When 1.6 is released, the option to define new groups with unique permissions will be available. Permissions will be able to be set to menus, modules and other content items. This will mean a huge amount of new flexibility in terms of who can see and modify what, opening the door to the possibility of administrators running on a non-Joomla powered website with unique user groups to migrate to Joomla in the future.

You can read more about the upcoming release of Joomla here.

Another good talk was on optimising your website for speed. We were presented with a number of tools that help webmasters assess the overall performance of their website. Yahoo’s “Yslow” plugin for Firefox being a popular way to record a comprehensive range of speed related stats for your website. “ChacheClear” is a handy little cache-clearing tool for Firefox that ensures that your speed results aren’t messed up by local browser cache! The use of Gzip, a popular compression method was also encouraged (This can be swtiched on in Joomla’s global configuration, and some professional templates come with options to optimise for Gzip).

Sam Moffat gave another security talk, most of his tips and tricks should be adopted immediately by anyone concerned with the integrity of their website. Full details from his presentation can be found here.

Overall I would call Melbourne Joomla Day a very valuable event for people working, or interested in working with, Joomla. It’s a great chance to go face-to-face with the people behind the software and they’re always more than willing to answer questions. Given the size of this year’s event, I can only assume there’ll be another run next year, bigger and better than ever before!

You can view all the speaker presentatons here. The official Twitter feed can be reviewed here!

The essential twitter details are @sydjug for their official feed and #SJD09 for the hashtag.

Tickets are only $50 and these days always prove very informative. Head over to the official Sydney JoomlaDay 2009 site to find out more.