MUGs in the Netherlands

Magento User Groups (MUGs) have existed for years already in the Netherlands, but only recently the thing started to explode - at least in the Netherlands. Yireo has been a co-founder of the MUG Amsterdam, a founder of MUG Den Bosch, while others started up with MUGs in Groningen and Rotterdam. Each group has its own thoughts on how to deal with a meetup, each group has its own approach. However, something has changed now.

Recently, the official Dutch community - Dutchento - took over the financing and marketing of each and every user group, so that organizers could focus on the fun part: Content and socializing, while being backed up by the official authority. With Yireo, we also picked up on this opportunity to spread the word of MUGs even more, leading to the concept of co-organizing MUGs with various different companies. This is also how the MUG Nijmegen came into existence.

First MUG in Nijmegen

Before we organized meetups in Amsterdam, Den Bosch, Tilburg, Utrecht, Nieuwegein and we are proud to add Nijmegen - an old town in the east of The Netherlands - to that list. Together with hosting provider Marqato and full service provider MaxServ, we put together a Magento User Group on Thursday 18th of May, with SEO as a topic.

The program is nice and organized: There will be an opening with some announcements and updates, a non-technical talk and a technical talk. Personally, I'm the most excited talk about the technical part, where MaxServ will explain how they worked together with Yoast in building a new SEO extension for Magento 2. And the meetup also marks the official release of this extension to the public!

Ehm, Yireo promoting Yoast?

It might strike as odd that Yireo (providing Magento extensions) promotes the release of a Magento extension created by Yoast (the competition). Well, that might be, but we don't feel that way. In the years, we have developed many extensions, mostly with developers in mind, and we even created some SEO utilities in the past as well. However, SEO is not our thing - we don't specialize in it.

And that's where Yoast comes in. They are widely known for their WordPress extension to help website owners improve their SEO. And this is now something that comes available to Magento 2 as well. Nothing to be ashamed off - we are simply proud to help another successful Dutch company do their thing. Hell, both companies got their names from their founders (Jisse, Joost).

In short

In short, this is going to be a great night. Do you own a Magento shop and want to learn more about SEO? Then this is your chance. You can sign up via meetup:

meetup.com/Magento-User-Group-Gelderland/events/237904454/

Disclaimer: The meetup is in Dutch only. And I know, promoting that meetup in a long long English post is ... weird. But that's why we're Dutch!