EEUK13 Notes & Thoughts
It has been 2 years since I was in Manchester and I forgot what a vibrant city it was. But it’s always great going to an EE event no matter where it is. I get as much excited about the event as I do meeting old and new faces.
It truly is a great community and even after 2 years, old friends pick up on conversations like they had only seen each other yesterday.
For all the talk Ian had about not being a conference organizer he certainly lived up to that title. Himself and Joel put on an excellent conference. The venue was perfect and it was a lovely sized crowd and everybody seemed to mix well. They had just enough breaks and the refreshments hit the spot.
Low's workshop the previous day I heard was a great success, although the poor guy looked exhausted after it. If you are going to EECI in October then I would recommend the workshop just based on the feedback I was hearing.
I was up first to speak and while the nerves were there I was excited to be presenting. It was a subject I had become obsessed with over the last year or so and wanted to share everything I had learnt. I had some good feedback for my talk but if you have any more I would love to hear the good and the bad whether it be in the comments below or a email.
Bending the EE Control Panel' Slides and Resources
I am home now, tired, cranky and still slightly hungover and sipping on a great cup of tea. While I watch my wife's eyes slowly glaze over as I relate the tales of Manchester, all I can think of is October when I get to do this all over again.
My notes on everybody else who spoke follow. I will update the slide links as I get them
Ben Croker
From Ben's pre-conference tweets I was aware he was going to release an add-on during his talk and oh boy did he. Ben introduced us to ExpressionEngine Open Api and it was obvious it was a well thought out add-on and a lot of work had been put into it. Ben also gave us insight into the document creation tool he used called apiary when creating his API docs
Joel Bradbury
Joel talked about hybrid websites. I was wondering what it was going to be about but I was familiar with the pattern he was alluding to once he started into things. Basically he was pointing out some business have more than a resources handling different aspects of their website(s). So you may have WordPress, EE and custom PHP running websites across the board. He finished with a great example of getting WordPress posts to work inside an ExpressionEngine template. While he warned us off doing such naughty things, I can’t wait to try it!
Joel’s Slides
Tim Mahoney
Tim’s talk was based around MySQL optimisation for ExpressionEngine. The first half of his talk he went through the types of servers, hardware and services that are available and the pros and cons. He walked us through some optimisation tips and queries. The talk was a lot to digest and I was floundering a bit to take it all in just after lunch but as Tim pointed out the slides are packed with useful info and are going to be a great resource to keep going back to.
Carl Crawley
Carl spoke about multilingual sites in ExpressionEngine. Its been a while since I have researched or have had to do a multilingual site so this was a great catchup to see what the state of play was like. Things seemed better now in EE with a bigger range of add-ons and methods to tackle multilingual. The fact that there were many ways to approach a multi-lingual site in EE still remained an issue. Well not so much an issue as Carl said but to be aware of all that is entailed when quoting a client. Some great tips were provided and again, his slides will become a great bookmark.
Carls Slides
Chris Imrie
Chris has made a great impression on the EE community of late and was interested in seeing what he had to show after his week of teasers. Chris explained his approach to EE and getting it to work outside the box. I am a huge fan of lateral thinking when it comes to problem solving in EE and Chris definitely works in this same way. His new add-on was Entry Analytics for ExpressionEngine). It is devilishly unique and brings Google Analytics into each entry edit page in EE. It has an especially pretty UI and I can already find plenty of clients who would relish the idea of this.