Joomladay DACH 2025 in Germany was a success

The German Joomladays, held this year at Kurhaus Bad Krozingen (near Freiburg, in southern Germany), were once again fantastic! Only my train journey there was a bit disappointing: with a two-hour delay, I was too late for the ‘Flammenkuchen’ at the pre-event dinner.

Day 1, Friday 14 November 2025

The first day started with a keynote from David Jardin, who explained the current CMS landscape and the opportunities it creates for Joomla developers.

After that, I joined the session by Benjamin Trenkle on the PHP concepts in Joomla 6. Then I attended Sigrid Gramlinger’s talk about using Joomla’s core features in creative ways to replace what many people normally solve with third-party extensions. The presentation from Allon Moritz on automated website testing was also quite inspiring.

After lunch, we had a "Speed-Dating" round where everyone had to find people they had never spoken to before and have a short introduction chat.

Then it was my turn to give my presentation on the Joomla Framework. I explained that Joomla is more than a CMS; it also provides the Joomla Framework, a collection of standalone PHP packages you can use to build custom applications without installing the CMS. These same packages power Joomla itself. With composer and Packagist, you can pull in only what you need and quickly assemble small, efficient applications using the Framework’s tools. The sheets of my presentation: The Joomla Framework.

The rest of the afternoon was a "Make it happen" session, where we split into groups to work on different parts of the Joomla project.

Day 2, Saturday 15 November 2025

Saturday began for me with Sigrid Gramlinger’s keynote about Joomla 6+. After that, I attended a presentation by Norbert Bayer about Joomla’s default SEO options without using extensions.

Then I gave my second talk, this time about Joomla’s Core Custom Fields. Since Joomla 3.7, Custom Fields allow you to add extra data to articles, categories, users and contacts. They appear in their own editing tab and make content management far more flexible. Joomla 6 now includes 18 core field types by default, and you can extend this further with third-party field plugins.

I demonstrated how smart use of Custom Fields reduces the need for additional extensions. And how to work with advanced field types such as Subform and SQL fields. Because there was a lot of interaction during the session, I even learned something new myself. Someone asked why Custom Fields don’t look very nice in the default Cassiopeia template. I explained that I usually work with YOOtheme Pro, where Custom Fields can be displayed beautifully, and that Cassiopeia typically requires template overrides to achieve the same result.

Then someone pointed out that Joomla’s default TinyMCE editor actually includes a feature to display Custom Fields more nicely.
(Note to self: check if the JCE editor I normally use, has that feature as well).
The sheets of my presentation: Joomla 6 Core Custom Fields.

Later I followed an interesting session by Hanna Znanewitz about Content Types in YOOtheme Pro version 5 which she showed with an example of a town website. After that, I joined a presentation by Sebastian Mohila about using AI in Joomla websites, followed by a session from Robert Klosko on AI avatars and videos. The last talk I attended was from Thorsten Bastian, who explained how psychology plays an important role in building a successful website.

Between the sessions and in the evening, I enjoyed interesting conversations with old Joomla friends and also with new people I met during the event. 

It was another great conference this year. Many thanks to the Joomladay DACH team and everyone who helped make it possible!