Picture by Rick Helsen
Whilst October 21st marked the launch of Umbraco v5 Alpha 3, it
also happened to coincide with the Dutch Umbraco Users Group's
(DUUG) regular get together to talk about all things Umbraco, which
on this occasion, was also set to be followed by a day long,
community organised hackathon learning how to get started
developing on v5. Well, with timing like that, how could we not
go?
DUUG Festival
The DUUG festival was held at the MediArena
studios, and housed a total of 60 attendees. The day started with
an intro to the event, swiftly followed by a session by our very
own Tim Geyssens comparing Umbraco v4 with v5, highlighting some of
the major differences between the two.
After a quick coffee break, it was my turn to get down and dirty
with Property & Parameter Editors in v5, explaining what they
are, how they work and how to go about making them.
But I wasn't finished there, and after a tasty lunch, I was back
on stage diving straight into Hive Providers. Very much a coders
session, I went through the Hive with a magnifying glass,
highlighting everything a developer needed to know to start
developing their own providers today.
At this point we thought we'd hogged the lime light enough for
the day, so handed things over to the guys from Spindoctor
to demo their behavioural targeting plugin for Umbraco (very
impressive) followed by diehard Umbraco community member Sebastiaan
Janssen to demo his own progress with v5 so far.
Throughout the day, there were also a series of Made in Holland
sessions, where the local community demoed and showcased their own
Umbraco projects. With Jeroen Breuer demoing the latest release of
DAMP, Sander Felius from Indivirtual
showcasing their use of Umbraco on the Heineken One web / mobile
sites and Richard Soeteman demoing his very own Media Protect package, it was great to see the
group celebrating their local talent.
And with that, day 1 came to end, as all days should end, at the
bar talking even more about Umbraco.
Hackathon
The hackathon was held at the amazing offices of These Days,
which was the perfect venue for it, and started with a group
brainstorming session to discuss what things people would like to
have a go at. Afterwards, everyone split into groups based on their
topics of interest, and the hacking began. Now, I'm not going to
lie, it was a bit of a slow start, with people hitting niggley
little problems getting things running. After a little guidance,
and perseverance from the developers though, things started to take
shape. And after a spot of lunch (seriously, do the Dutch have
satay sauce with everything?) things were well and truly steaming
ahead. You could almost hear everyone's brains ticking away. It was
buzzing. The sounds of keys tapping only stopping for the
occasional cheer and round of applause as peoples projects began to
come together.
The next thing we knew, it was nearly 5 o'clock. We couldn't
believe it, we could have kept going for hours, if not another day,
but we finished off our projects as best we could, and presented
them back to the group. The sheer diversity was immense, with
people developing all sorts of things from Skins, Hive Providers
and Property Editors and even a Surface Controller, which hasn't
even been documented yet, it was really amazing to see. At the end,
the feeling we got was that people were excited by it, and were
keen to keep tinkering. But don't just taken our word for it
though, check out the video below, and you can hear it straight
from the horses mouth.
In all, they day itself was so much fun, and for us was a great way
to get some much needed real and candid user feedback. It wasn't
all positive, but then how would we improve if it was, but in the
coming weeks, we hope to address many of the issues that were
raised and make it much easier and clearer for new developers to
get started experimenting with v5. Watch this space...
And with that, we would like to thank the organisers of DUUG (Richard
Soeteman of Soeteman Software & Martijn Beumers of Axendo, sponsored
by Indivirtual) and the hackathon (Dirk De Grave
of Promex &
the guys from These Days) for giving us the opportunity to
join them, and the community members who joined us for their
continued love for Umbraco. We are nothing without you.
PS. If you are attending the Umbraco UK Festival in London,
there is still chance to join our UK hackathon session on the
Thursday before. Simply fill in our form, and
we'll select 24 people at random to join us. Good luck.