Every year at CodeGarden we run a package competition, where
attendees have the opportunity to submit an Umbraco package that
extends the out of the box functionality of Umbraco.
At the end of CodeGarden we ask all our package competition
entries to present their package, giving them 5 minutes a piece to
present before being thrown off the stage, finished or not.
Submissions can range from useful and powerful packages to the
downright silly, which of course, we love :)
Prizes
This year we introduced a theme for our package competition
prizes, deciding on cool DIY build projects (such as some great Arduino projects that we
found).
Third Prize - Useless Machine
This is not an Arduino project, however we saw this and it made us
smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4
Second Prize -Thingamagoop 2
This is a handmade, analog and digital synthesizer that you
control with light. It is built with Arduino so it could be
reprogrammed to do something else.
http://bleeplabs.com/thingamagoop2/
First Prize - Thing-O-Matic MakerBot
This was a great first prize, an open source Arduino 3D printer
from the guys over at MakerBot in New York that allows you to print
3D objects from your computer. Want to print out a kazoo to relive
the memory of the CodeGarden marching band from bingo, sure
can!!
http://www.makerbot.com
The Winners
The packages were judged by the attendees with the biggest
cheers and the winners for this year were as follows:
3rd Place - uBackChat
Lee Kelleher demo'd a package that allowed
users of the Umbraco back office to instant message one another,
this could be useful for clients where more than one editor is
likely to be working on the site at the same time.
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ubackchat
https://bitbucket.org/vertino/ubackchat/src
2nd Place - Optimize It
Morten
Christensen demo'd a great utility package for Umbraco that
allows you to optimise your CSS and JavaScript from the Umbraco
back office in a few clicks, such as generating a sprite image from
your CSS, prettify and minify your CSS and other useful utilities
that you may want.
Unfortunately Morten ran out of time when demoing this at
CodeGarden, however he still managed to bag 2nd place with this
fantastic package.
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/optimize-it
http://blog.sitereactor.dk/2011/06/19/optimize-it-package-for-umbraco
1st Place - uBrokeIt
Tim
Payne showed us a great package called uBrokeIt, which was a
great little fun package that was not to be taken seriously.
uBrokeIt allows you to introduce non destructive and amusing bugs
into the back office such as 'boss mode' and 'kitten mode'. Rather
than me trying to explain this fun/silly package, I will let Tim do
a much better job with his screencast.
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/ubrokeit
http://www.screenr.com/22Bs
However with these great packages I need to give a big
honourable mention to Matt
Brailsford who was the only one to submit a package developed
against V5 of Umbraco, so massive kudos to Matt for demoing a V5
package. High Five You Rock!
Congratulations to all our winners and thanks again to everyone
who entered the package competition. High Five You Rock! I must
admit I am jealous of Tim winning that awesome 3D printer, it looks
like it will be a fun project to build!
Has all this talk of CodeGarden got you excited about what next
year's CodeGarden will bring? Wondering how can it get any better?
Trust us, it can! So make sure to get in early with our super early discount for CodeGarden12
tickets at a low price for a limited time (first 100 tickets or
when we remember to turn the discount off).
Well that's it for this year's CodeGarden follow-up blog posts,
make sure you keep your eyes peeled on the Umbraco twitter stream and the CodeGarden11
site as we continue to release a new video each workday.
Until next year.... have fun, and don't forget to pack your
kazoo's for next year :)
Cheers,
Warren & The Umbraco HQ