Wow what a week! EECI in Brooklyn was a huge success and the ExpressionEngine event of the year. Great speakers, great people, great organisation and an amazing venue! Below are some of my personal highlights.

EECI 2011 cheat sheet

DevDay #

  • Thrown together in groups of 8 – 10, I end up in a group of all developers (no designers) so we decide to build some kick-ass features and hope that the USB stick we get has some graphics pre-loaded on it (it doesn’t).
  • The guy sitting next to me, Luke from eecoder, becomes my best friend for the day as we throw ideas around.
  • We present the site that we have built in a day to the entire room, wow the audience with our ratings bar and crack them up with our trademark developer” design, including our (what’s that, hover makes it italicised) call-to-action text in Georgia!

Conference Day 1 #

  • Leslie Camancho (EllisLab CEO) reveals some exciting stats about ExpressionEngine, good news about the state of the company and a nice license update for CodeIgniter.
  • David Dexter demoes the beast that is BrilliantRetail (now I get the blue gorilla illustration). Seriously impressive amount of features (that must have taken a while), although personally I still prefer CartThrob’s philosophy and implementation.
  • Lodewijk Schutte talks about parse order in detail, highlighting unexpected bahaviour and performance factors.
  • Aaron Gustafson talks about progressive enhancement and graceful degradation — this topic can get very in-depth — and how we can start using HTML5 now.
  • Am chatting with some attendees when one of them (@cwcrawley) mentions a great add-on development cheat sheet” — he is referring to this — love it when that happens!

Conference Day 2 #

  • Matt Weinberg offers up 10 ways to rock ExpressionEngine — mentions my loop plugin and some other great tips for EE developers.
  • Brian Warren presents his talk on how to make client-friendly experiences with EE that really makes me think twice about client interaction and thier specific data input needs.
  • Mark Huot shares some nice coding conventions for developing EE add-ons, in particular his config and mhbase files.
  • Afterparty with my fellow ExpressionEngine community members… need I say more?

A big THANK YOU to Robert for organising the event. I’m already looking forward to next year’s EECI and any upcoming EE events in Europe, which I would even be willing to help organise.

I have only mentioned some of the talks above. Check out the links to all of the slides from the conference.