Adventures in the CiviCRM community

I was at the Benelux developer and implementer training

The decision was made some time ago. We are going to migrate our organisation's administration to CiviCRM, on top of Drupal. We needed some training, so we contacted Mediaraven. I'm not sure what exactly happened then, but some days later we were suddenly registered for the Benelux developer and implementer training. A two day training in Ghent, at the Mediaraven headquarters. With about 20 civicrm-enthousiasts from the Benelux and beyond.

The training started at 9.00 am. I had to take a train at 7:20. And even then, I was late. My collegue and I arrived at 9.07, and everyone else was already there, introducing theirselves, while chocolates were flying through the air. Being part of the CiviCRM community involves - as it seemed - a certain amount of chocolate.

The concept of the training was that ErikHommel and the Xavier introduced a topic, and after that, we had some time to play with it on our local CiviCRM installations. This way we looked at extensions, hooks, the API, templates, and so on. Interesting subjects, and of course, it helps when others are around when you are stuck with something. We dived into the community: the IRC, the forums, the wiki, the handbook. We learnt about code sprints. And about how to write unit tests.

There was coffee. There was soup, and sandwiches at noon. And after the training, there was Belgian beer and tech talk. What more do you need?

As I am writing down this blog post, the training is over. I learned a lot, and I am full of energy to start with the implementation. I want to contribute to the CiviCRM project. I even seem to be part of the civicrm blogger community now.

I still cannot catch flying chocolates though. So I guess I will have to attend the june code sprint in southern France. To improve my catching skills.