Beyounic is the team behind Ohanah, a social event management platform built on Nooku Framework. They have become great friends in the past year and we (Tom and myself) were very excited to travel to Lugano to see their new office and organize a Nooku Jam together.

Geeks, students and teachers

Despite the exam period, we got a room full of interested informatics students, teachers and many other great people coming also from abroad. (@andreatorre came over all the way from Rome, Italy @luscarpa joined us from Venice, Italy)

With so many really talented people in the room, we were able to touch some very technical topics. Design patterns, use of web 3.0/semantic technologies, security, etc. Feedback during and after the event was great.  The Jam was well appreciated by the faculty program manager and the participants.

First Nooku Developer Group

The afternoon after the event, a group of students got really interested in learning more about the Nooku Framework. For us this means the first seed for a swiss Nooku developer group has been successfully planted!

Workshopping and brainstorming

The rest of the week flew by quickly being fully immersed on a really productive workshop with the Beyounic Team. We spent time working on Nooku Framework Incubator ideas and on the Ohanah business model. The Ohanah roadmap is now in place and there will soon be some good news for the Joomla world, stay tuned. Keep a close watch on Ohanah.com.

Inspiring week

It was an amazing, inspiring and collaborative week. Excellent weather, lots of fun, Italian coffee and good food. It is always a great and inspiring experience to be working together, with good friends from Beyounic, on what we mostly love, and at the same time to see project cooperation from two companies walking on the same path. Thanks again guys!

Although the Partnership originally focused on Nooku Content, it was the underlying Nooku Framework that really opened BEDRE reklame’s eyes.

According to Torkil Johnsen, “The Nooku Framework has so far proven to be both a time and lifesaver. Thanks to this technology, we are able to produce more secure and robust code in a shorter amount of time, when creating Joomla extensions”.

As our first Norwegian partner, BEDRE reklame is now enjoying the benefits of Joomla’s only  enterprise grade translation system as well as the RAD framework that made it possible. Definitely a win win for BEDRE reklame.

We would like to thank BEDRE reklame for their support, and look forward to many years of mutually beneficial development on Nooku Content and Nooku Framework.

Rastin’s experience with Nooku Framework took Anahita to unexpected levels :

• rmd Studio discovers Nooku Framework
• Subsequently entirely re-wrote Anahita (using Nooku) in six weeks
• Far more fun!
• Could not have built Anahita without Nooku Framework
• Plugs into Joomla!
• "Alien-life form inside Joomla! makes Joomla better and smarter and live longer…"
• Nooku Framework is "the MVC core that Joomla always wanted"
  

More information about Anahita Social Engine can be found on Anahitapolis.com

Anahita Social Engine for Joomla from Nooku on Vimeo.

The site was built by one of our Swiss Nooku partners, Masterhomepage, who did the technical implementation. If you want to offer Nooku Content to your clients and help them sell their products and services in local languages around the world, sign-up to be a Nooku partner.

How does it work? Just as always, you publish an article or add content to your website, in your local language. With the click of a button, your content is emailed to translators who will send back the translated files in the required languages of choice.

We think that’s pretty cool: it will help allow customers and readers to have more multi-lingual conversations, just like the real world. Let us know if you want to integrate other web services with Nooku Content, so website developers and content managers can make really great websites!

The site was built by one of our Nooku Content partners, One Company, who did the technical implementation and initial content set-up. Viavac (the Customer) did all of the content translation themselves using Nooku Content.

If you want to offer Nooku Content to your clients and help them sell their products and services in local languages around the world, sign-up to be a Nooku partner.

International reach

“Minihouse provides software solutions to help companies all across Europe with managing import and export activities”, says Rene Kreijveld from One-Company. “To expand their sales efforts outside the Netherlands, they needed a site that could easily communicate their solutions to Dutch, English, French and German speakers.”  Minihouse realised that to be able to do business across Europe a multi-lingual website was top priority.

Perfect integration

“We deployed Nooku Content easily through Joomla’s installer, added the languages, and got it up and running in no time. But our biggest challenge when working with clients, is getting them trained on new applications. With Nooku Content we had no such worries. It integrates seamlessly with Joomla sites. The client didn’t have to learn a new user interface. We only had to give them one day of Joomla training — and less than 30 minutes was spent on Nooku Content!”

Minihouse were delighted to see how easy it is for their users: soon they were adding, editing and translating content as if they’ve done it their whole lives. Kreijveld: “Put it this way: my main contact now is their head of marketing!”

Picking a multi-lingual solution

One-Company builds and hosts open source CMS-based websites, most of them built on Joomla. “Today more and more of our clients are running multi-language websites. We needed a native Joomla 1.5 extension that was professionally developed, by people who understand Joomla completely. We experimented with Joomfish, but we didn’t like it’s counter-intuitive user interface and complex configuration options. After hearing about Nooku Content, we got in touch to see a live demo. We tested Nooku Content thouroughly before using it for the Minihouse website, and we are convinced that it’s the best solution for Joomla content translation,” Kreijveld concludes. “We are excited to be able to support the Nooku team.”

“We evaluated many open source software solutions and found Joomla to be the best for us,” says Philippe Chabot, ICT coordinator at the United Nations. “When we looked at our two options, Drupal did not perform as well as Joomla. Now that we have a lot of experience with Joomla we are no longer looking at other applications. Of course, from time to time, for risk management best practices we will evaluate all available options.”

Making a multi-lingual Joomla website

“In the previous version of our European portal, we used a free extension called Joomfish,” says Chabot, “but with our new Joomla 1.5 website we needed something that could handle our requirements in terms of performance and usability.”

And a big organization has big requirements: the UN is running an information portal in 13 languages, with a European audience that averages 50,000 monthly visitors and delivers over 5 million page views a month.

“Before migrating more than 30.000 articles and translations into a new version of the entire site using Nooku, we decided to run a test case. We used Nooku Content for a campaign we have developed called ‘Know Your Rights’, for the 60th anniversary of the Human Rights Declaration.” The site can be found at http://html.knowyourrights2008.org/ .

The site was built internally, but with some help from an external designer with experience working with Joomla. There are three staff members running & maintaining the site, but none of them are developers!

Straightforward translations

“We found working with Nooku Content extremely easy and straightforward. Nooku Content also offers a lot of reporting and graphs, that we haven’t even fully explored yet!” When asked what he likes best about Nooku Content , Philippe Chabot replied: “Its seamless integration into Joomla and the outstanding performance make it a great solution for high performing multilingual websites.”

• Ciboodle – A global provider of customer oriented business software and services with offices in the USA, Europe & Asia.
• Cowie & Fox – An interactive, branding & web design agency with offices in Canada.
• Discouri – A design firm specializing in PHP and MySQL, with a particular emphasis on the open source PHP package, Joomla! Offices in the USA.
• Fohlin – a web design agency that focused on European companies and organizations.
  Offices in Sweden.
• Johnson Diversy – a leading global provider of commercial cleaning and hygiene products and solutions for food safety, food and beverage hygiene, floor care, housekeeping, laundry, hand hygiene and industrial cleaning. Offices in the US, Europe & Asia.
• Masterhomepages – is one of the best known internet agencies specialised in Joomla with offices in Switzerland.
• Marvellic – provide open source cms solutions, web development service and cms training throughout Asia with offices in Thailand.
• Xd Net – a specialist in open source cms and e-commerce solutions focusing on development services. Offices in Mallorca.

We would also like to take a moment to thank our founding partners in the development of Nooku which include Delius (Belgium), Dutch Open Projects (The Netherlands), McNolia (The Netherlands), One Company (The Netherlands), The Belgian Local Police (Belgium), Unicum
(Switzerland), UNRIC (Europe) and Webtranslations (United Kingdom)

We now have a total of 15 companies that have all joined forces with Joomlatools to build Nooku Content, the new way to manage content and build multi-lingual Joomla websites. If you are in need of professional help to build a truly multi-lingual Joomla site please feel free to get in touch with our partners for help.

And, if you want to become a Nooku partner and be amongst the first to build great multi-lingual Joomla sites please get in touch with us.