Last week, Tim and I went to the first european Expression Engine and CodeIgniter conference, held in Leiden, Netherlands. The conference was held at the Scheltema complex and organised by Whoooz! webmedia from Leiden, they did an excellent job! It was the first time we had the chance to meet with the EllisLab community. As a webdesigner myself, i was very anxious to meet with and listen to the speakers and attendees.

A few years ago, we decided to switch to EE from our existing CMS system. The biggest reason for the switch was the unflexibility of the system we used. After reading tons of blogposts about the EE system and seeing some great designs from webdesigners using EE, my mind was set on using EE. The EE community is just great (very helpful and efficient) and has a lot of designers.

A short conference wrap-up

The first day (22/10/2009)

The first day, we had a chance to listen to some fine presentations (some are left out, because I followed the EE path and not the CodeIgniter path)

Watch the presentations and slides on the EECI website

• Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab.View his presentation on Vimeo
• Simon Collison Co-founder of Erskine Design and a true EE evangelist. Very funny and entertaining presentation, he sketched a background of Erskine Design, the different approaches of project and the history of his design agency with Expression Engine.
• Derek Allard Technology Architect at EllisLab.Derek talked about the history of EE and pMachine. He announced that Expression Engine 2.0 will be released on 1st Dec 2009. Everyone happy!
• Veerle Pieters Graphic/web designer at Duoh!. Veerle talked about the design process of the new EE 2.0 interface. She ran through a lot of design adjustments before she was finally happy. She also gave us an insight in the brief and the goals that were set before starting the design. I think everyone is happy with the end result!
• Ryan Irelan Senior Web Developer Airbag Industries and Happy Cog. Founder of EE Screencasts
• Brandon Kelly Senior UI Developer at LEVEL Studios, California. Brandon announced that he is going to be a fulltime add-on developer for EE. He gave us a bit more insight in the development process of add ons.
• Michael Boyink Founder and principal of Train-ee.com. Michael explained how he deals with client projects. He made a visual explanation of the project estimation. Informative and clear presentation.
• Leevi Graham Technical Director and one of the founding partners at Newism. Leevi gave us some insight into the code of his add ons.

The second conference day (23/10/2009)

• On the second day of the conference, I attended 3 workshops more related to web design. The first one was held by John Henry Donovan Web developer & designer and Tech. Support Specialist at EllisLab. He did a showcase of web-galleries and the integration in EE. Mainly because EE 2.0 will not contain the galleries module which is a good thing, i think.
• In the afternoon, Jamie Pittock from Erskine Design, presented us ‘The Art of Proactive Parenting’ His talk was about how to inform and prepare your clients to work with EE. I loved the drawings that were made for his presentation slides.
• The last workshop/presentation was given by Jonathan Longnecker, co-founder of FortySeven Media He did a demo on the design of a simple website and gave us some ways to speed up the design and development process of each website.

Final note

I was happy to meet so many EE users/designers and some Belgian design(ers) agencies too like Veerle Pieters and Geert Leyseele from Duoh!,Pixelman,Matuvu, ThisConnect, Glue, iWorx, Stookstudio and B.U.T. It surely did encourage me to further explore this wonderful community.

Check out this Flickr sets:

• Set 1 by whoooz.webmedia
• Set 2 by Matthew Pennell
• Set 3 by Nate Croft
• Set 4 by Christiaan Arthur Hemerik
• Set 5 by Eldkvast