Day 1: Technically, day 1 was a fabulous dinner hosted by CiviCRM at Herbsaint in the warehouse district of New Orleans. This is Susan Spicer's restaurant, and it was delicious -- they even made the vegetarian (me) a special-not-on-the-menu meal! We took this time to get to know each other and talk a bit about CiviCRM, what we liked/disliked, and the development community in general.

Day 2: 9 AM start at the Sheraton on Canal Street. Dave took us through a CiviCRM tour to go over new 2.0 features and other features/settings we may have not been familiar with. Went through the Global Settings piece by piece...some of the new or under-used pieces include fiscal year start in the Date settings and a new "Case" feature in CiviCRM that can be turned on under Site Preferences (this is in early stages). Walked through the "Tell a Friend" option that comes as a setting on any membership/donation/event form. We looked at the new contribution widget (you can control what it says, and supposedly how it looks but you may need Flash for that). Demoed "Pay Later".

This was followed up by a long discussion about debugging. Most basic debugging is to turn on backtrace and debugging in Global Settings > Debugging. You can also customize the debugging template file so that it gives a more user-friendly message or looks different. How to do this is part of customizing CiviCRM through custom templates, which I will talk about later.

More debugging tips: if you are stumped on a page (especially useful during custom template coding, etc), you can add "&smartyDebug=1" to the end of whatever URL you're looking at (make sure you enable pop-ups). This will pop up a window that shows you all of that template's variables and their values...very useful. You can debug your session by adding "&sessionDebug=1", you can reset your session with "&sessionReset=1", and you can view raw html snippet output by "&snippet=1". For more info on debugging, there is a wiki page here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Debug+Tools

The rest of Day 1 is more pertinent once you know about Day 2, so we're moving right along. We stayed in our cave until at least 7 PM, so we must have done a lot!