In a recent twitter give and take with Cory Webb, we kicked around some ideas about Joomla Day. He suggested the US just have one Joomla Day, rather than local ones. I suggested explicitly regional ones. Instead of Joomla Day Atlanta, call it Joomla Day Southeast, for example. His concern was how to conter declining attendance at Joomla Days. Bringing in an analogy from retail, I suggested looking at things like combination Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robins franchises. These are complimentary business lines that work well together to bring in foot traffic. Maybe we should have Joomla/Magento Days, or Joomla/Moodle Days or Joomla/SuiteCRM Days. This made me think of Jisse Reitsma and his Yireo extensions that make Joomla and Magento work together. We could have tracks on Magento and Joomla, and have Jisse as the keynote speaker to pull it all together. We could extend the old Reese's commercial as: "Hey, you to Joomla in my Magento", "Hey, you got Magento in my Joomla!".
Then I was thinking of the larger question: Why Joomla?
This is what all of us face when trying to sell a Joomla solution. I've tried various approaches, such as: Joomla's technically superior to Wordpress and aesthetically superior to Drupal. That's not a compelling argument, though. It's like a track coach said about one of his atheletes who ran cross-country and threw shot. The coach said "He's the fastest shot-putter and strongest runner on our team." Not a winner.
I've also taken a lead from Nicholas Dionysopoulos of Akeeba fame, and broke it up as:
- WordPress is for Users
- Drupal is for Programmers
- Joomla is for Designers
Which is a bit more compelling, but if this is our message, I'm not sure we're reaching our target audience of designers.
Then with the idea of combining Joomla Day with some other Open Source community, I thought we could position Joomla as: The CMS That Plays Well with Others to highlight interoperability. This may also be a way to counteract the perception of Joomla falling popularity. We work hard to leverage other open-source projects and communities to make sure Joomla interoperates well with them. Thus we can reach a larger audience by getting the word out on cross-compatibality, as above. We could get the Fabrik guys to show how to pull in information from other system's db tables, etc. But this should be a message of the community as a whole and would need broad support to succeed. So I'll leave the question open: Why Joomla? What's our distinctive? What's our Tagline (other than "because Open Source Matters"?) What's our compelling reason to exist?