J!Day España (Spain) 2012 took place recently in the ancient Roman city of Mérida, and our own Saurabh Shah, a CloudAccess.net front end developer, lead a presentation & workshop at the event. Saurabh’s session was titled “Create & Modify Joomla! Templates” and his goal was to teach people how to create their own Joomla! templates through one of the following ways:

• by copying and modifying an existing template
• by installing and modifying an existing theme
• by creating a template from scratch using the Gantry Framework

View Saurabh’s Presentation Here

Saurabh reported that a good crowd showed up for his presentation and that they benefited from the useful tools used to speed up the development process as well as the tips and tricks he had for working with the Gantry Framework. He received a lot of great feedback about his presentation.

Saurabh said that there were many other interesting presentations and workshops including “Blogging with Joomla!” by Kristoffer, “E-commerce with VirtueMart” by Max, “Introduction to the SobiPro Component and The Future of Joomla!”, “Joomla! 3.0”  by Isidro , and a Joomla Template Responsive Design workshop by Alberto.

   
Congratulations to the J!Day Spain organizers on the successful event. Saurabh would specifically like to thank Pedro Vidal, Jose Ferrero, Irene López, Albert Bosom, Alberto Gómez-Chacón and Javier Mendoza for inviting him and letting him take part of the event. He’d also like to give a special shout out to Kristoffer Sandven (a.k.a @joomlablogger) for being his English-speaking companion for the entire event and for accompanying him around the city of Mérida. Saurabh is also thankful to Albert, Alberto and Angel Garcia Zinsel for giving him a tour of Madrid.

Saurabh had a great time at the event in Merida especially because professional translators were provided by local government specifically for the J!Day event. They provided the real time translations for Spanish, Portuguese and English to assist non-Spanish speaking attendees a chance to understand presentations. Every J!Day event could benefit from this type of service.

In fact, everywhere Saurabh went he felt welcomed. Even though he knew little Spanish going in, local people approached him and tried to make him feel more comfortable by speaking English with him. While in Mérida, Saurabh was also lucky to see the Roman Legion at a yearly event called the “White Night”.