At the J and Beyond conference this past weekend in Germany, a number of people commented to me that the vibe around this year’s meeting was very different from the 2011 conference.

This was my third J and Beyond and I personally came away feeling a lot more encouraged, engaged, inspired and motivated than in previous years.

To be clear, the prior J and Beyond events as well as Joomla Days I attend have always given me a little extra purpose and warm feeling in my stomach. However, J and Beyond 2012 seems to have pushed those feelings to a much higher level.

This got me thinking about the changes in the Joomla project over the lifetime of J and Beyond — the past three years — that might have resulted in such a difference in my attitude specifically in 2012.

A few weeks ago we invited you to join us at the 2012 J and Beyond Joomla developer conference in Germany where Anything Digital will be leading two sessions in the program.

The conference is now just a few weeks away and we are proud to announce that we are also officially sponsoring the event.

Community involvement is an important part of our mission at Anything Digital and we are happy to donate some of our resources to great causes such as conferences, Joomla Days and of course the various Joomla committees we participate in such as the recently-formed Events team.

In closing, please let me again invite you to join us at J and Beyond 2012.

We hope to meet you there!

Each year we attend numerous Joomla Days and conferences around the world.

The highlight of these events is always the international J and Beyond or JAB conference. As in past years, we are attending JAB 2012 to meet users, showcase our products and interact with our colleagues.

JAB 2012 is being held in Bad Nauheim, a small town near Frankfurt, Germany where Elvis Presley was stationed during his time in the US Army. Thus, the theme for JAB 2012 is Meet the Joomla Rock Stars. Given the theme, you might spot a few Elvis impersonators in the sessions and perhaps even on stage!

The inaugural Joomla Day Midwest at Potowatami Casino in Milwaukee (Wisconsin, USA) is coming up on Nov. 12, 2011 and Anything Digital will be there!

In addition to co-hosting the event, I will personally be on hand to meet and greet our customers. I am also speaking about one of our exciting new products, Advanced Site Search.

Yannick Gaultier, the sh404SEF® developer, will also be on hand to discuss improving the search engine rankings of your Joomla web site.

Finally, Jeff Channell, the Lead Developer of Advanced Site Search and the upcoming JCal Pro® 3 will be discussing security best practices when programming in PHP.

Recently Yannick Gaultier, senior partner at Anything Digital and lead developer of sh404SEF®, attended Joomla Day South Africa in Cape Town.

We love going to Joomla events to discuss our products and the Cape Town was no exception.

Yannick had the chance to go over the basics of sh404SEF®, such as solving the duplicate URL problem common for Joomla-based web sites (slides below).