CiviCRM team members had the opportunity to attend the BADCamp Oct. (11/12) held in University of California, Berkley. We decided to sit through the lectures of our respective interests.
We had a pretty basic yet impressive session on jquery by Dmitri Gaskin. jQuery makes it significantly easier for developers to extend the functionality and usability of their applications. Amit Asaravala gave some useful examples of how to use jquery with the Nice Menu module, and gave tips for creating Smarter Interfaces using jQuery. Also discussed how to make use of the jQuery library to make sites more responsive, intuitive, and fun. We had another session for Ajax with Tao Starbow which covered the basic concepts behind Ajax, practical use of jQuery's Ajax functions, and the jQuery Forms plugin (which is now part of Drupal's core).
After lunch, we had a yet another interesting session on Database Synchronization by Shaun Haber on an issue nearly every developer faces, which is merging content between a dev site and a production site. We were walked through watered-down live demo, showing how to programmatically apply all development changes to an existing site. Another session was about showcasing the Panels 2 module and talk about how it works for the content layout on drupal site. Matt discussed a few tricks to provide WYSIWYG support for content created in panel panes and versioning of panel pages to move them between staging and production.
View2 session was nuts and bolts presentation of how the Views 2 UI is constructed conducted by Earl Miles and Panels session by Matt Cheney explained how you can change look and feel of a website using Panels.
Day started with Introductory CiviCRM session by Kurund Jalmi. It was good to hear from community/implementers regarding their experiences and suggestion that can be incorporated to improve CiviCRM. After this session we decided to attend session on Patterns by Chris Bryant. Concept of patterns is really good and it helps / fasten the process to create drupal websites. Post lunch session on Introduction to CCK by Dmitri Gaskin was also good.
At the end of Day 2, we decided to treat ourselves to waterfronts of Jack London Square and took a ferry ride back to SF.
These two days were very eventful. Learned a lot about Drupal and other nice/cool stuff. Overall this was a great experience for me.
