So my first proper session was about TYPO3, a CMS written in PHP. The 3 guys presenting, gave a good introduction via a live demo of the system, and showed some cool ideas that they've implement. I was interested on a personal level to see what they'd encountered with the development of the admin side, and they certainly tried to cover many aspects. It was a little too busy for me, but they also mentioned that through the use of skins you can simplfy what you see. There is also a lot of configuration you can use to default many settings. There were some nice aspects to page referencing within the document tree that I thought were very nice and may end up adapting for Labyrinth.
The second session was titled "Automate the creation of web sites, given a data model". It took the idea of metadata and allowed you to link to further data. It's perhaps not a new idea, but the implementation was well executed and the examples highlighted what the speaker had done extremely well. He works for The Washington Post, and seems to have intergrated his ideas as a form of journalistic research.
Next up I went along to "Voluntary groups and money", which I thought might be interesting now that Birmingham Perl Mongers are a non-profit limited company. However, the topic of conversation was much more centred around how you pay individuals for work they've done on projects. There was quite a bit of discussion, but none of it was relevant to how B.pm operates (as a non-profit, we are not allowed to claim a salary).
The last session of the day was Damin Conway with "Giving Better Presentations". I'd heard about this talk before and was intrigued to see what tips I could learn in helping me to be a better presenter. I'm not a natural presenter and I'm actually extremely self-concious during presentations. A number of the points Damian made were things I've already thought about, but there were some that I'm going to take away and digest and see how I can improve my own performance. I would like to get better as there are several ideas for talks I've like to present.
Several people are here for the conference and have arrived early. It's been good to see Aaron, Murray, Jesse, Jouke and others here. I'm now wishing I could have stayed longer, but I'll be heading back home on Tuesday. Nicole thought she was getting me back in September ... little did she know!
Now for the Beer Track ... or was it Euro Bar Camp?
