Notes from EEUK 2011
EE 2011 was held in the magnificent Manchester Town Hall with it’s amazing Gothic architecture, and organised by Ian Ebden of http://www.designkarma.co.uk/ whom we are indebted for all his hard work making the event possible. You can read Ian’s blog about the event at http://www.designkarma.co.uk/index.php/blog/comments/eeuk11-is-a-wrap .
The welcome sign, even though the photo is a tad blurry!
This is just a brief overview of the talks, at the time of writing it seems no-one has posted many presentations or photos yet so keep an eye out on Twitter/Flickr and the speakers sites.
Joel Bradbury - Design Patterns in EE
Joel’s talk revolved around various methods of naming conventions when building up an EE site, explaining that using a standard format and approach is very beneficial, especially when team working.
http://joelbradbury.net/notes/eeuk
John Henry Donovan - Faceted Navigation Techniques in ExpressionEngine
I was curious about what John meant by “faceted”, it turned out to be a look into how to filter content by various content parameters using a Javascript powered example.
http://5pieces.com/
Leslie Flinger - Freelancing as an EE Developer: Tools of Success
Some excellent tips and tricks for freelancers.
http://mrs.flinger.us/
I wonder what people are nattering about?
Stephen Lewis - Commercial Add-on Development for Clients
Although I’m not an addon developer it was great to see Stevens semi-automated process of building an addon structure in action.
http://exper.co.uk/
Lodewijk Schutte - Parse Order Pro
The man who lives on a cool concrete barge in Holland gave a super talk about EE’s parse order. I suspect this went over a few peoples heads as it is quite a mind bender to suss it out in your head, fortunately I managed to grasp the concept a while back!
http://loweblog.com/
The afternoon cakes were popular!
Carl Crawley - Optimus PrimEEr: Setting up the Optimal EE Configuration
It seems everyones method of starting a fresh EE site install. Carl explained how they use an “assets” folder to store items such as EE config/database files, javscripts and other site assets. Worth noting that their base install doesn’t include any 3rd party addons and they initially disable many modules that are enabled by default (ie Emoticons), choosing only to activate them during the site build as required.
http://www.madebyhippo.com/herdspeak/view/eeuk11_structuring_your_eecms_build
Garrett Winder - Going Mobile
Serving up content for non-desktop devices raises a lot of questions, do you make separate sites or go responsive? Garrett walked us through the pro’s and con’s of the various options available to us.
http://garrettwinder.com/2011/08/27/eeuk11/
Thanks to Karl Bowers for putting me up and Sarah for the lovely meal. Conferences can be too short to chat to a lot of folks but hello to Robert Eerhart and Jamie Pittock whom I chatted to in the outside smoke room, Dan Booth who caught the same train, John Henry Donovan for kind words about my EE forum posts, and Tim Mahoney for an interesting chat about addon development.
by Rob Allen | Filed in ExpressionEngine