Umbraco Codegarden09 Wrap Up

There are lots of words used to describe Umbraco Codegarden09, my two favorite being Ole Erling!  This year's Codegarden had 174 attendees, loads of speakers, 36 open space sessions, 1,000's of lines of code, 100's of liters of beer, and some - one of a kind - bed sheets printed with a goofy picture of the Umbraco Core Team and MVPs taken home by the lucky Umbraco bingo winner.

3651210817_9e24d2cf8c_m[1]

Venue

The venue this year in Copenhagen was Kedelhallen and it was fantastic - plenty of space to interact and collaborate, a cozy cafe, lawns filled with chairs, and the weather was absolutely perfect (a Codegarden tradition).  Personally, I had a fantastic experience meeting many new people in the community and (finally) meeting people I interact with daily in Twitter and the Umbraco Forum.  I never had a minute where I thought 'what should I do now?' as friendly Umbraco people were eager to share, discuss, and chat - this is one of the things that makes Umbraco Codegarden unique among conferences. 

Real Time Input

Between the Core Team retreat and Codegarden the week spent with Umbraco people was exhausting, inspiring, and extraordinarily productive.  As many know already, one of my main projects is Commerce for Umbraco and I received excellent and relevant feedback from a number of attendees regarding items that work well and items that don't work as well.  This type of feedback is the most valuable for an open source project as it gives us a direction.  Based on the feedback and experiences of the project's users we expect a full release in approximately 60-days - hurray!

Umbraco Store

Another area that I focus some of my time and money in is the development of the Umbraco Store (http://store.umbraco.org/) and this received feedback as well.  During an open space session we discussed integrating the three current package repositories (projects on our.umbraco.org, package repository, and the Umbraco Store) into a  more unified user experience.  From this session we created very clear, actionable items with assigned owners and, with some luck and a bit of work, we'll have prototype of the integrated experience in a few weeks.  Look for more posts from me on this topic as we continue to develop it.  One interesting item is that the reluctance to commercialize one's work by selling packages in the Umbraco Store was noticeably absent in discussions this year.

Our Umbraco

As you no doubt already know, the new Umbraco community site was unveiled at Codegarden09 (http://our.umbraco.org/).  This site sets the standard for a much higher level of collaboration between members of the Umbraco community.  If you haven't seen it yet, go check it out now.

Umbraco ASP.NET MVC

Some of the biggest news is the announcement of Umbraco's adoption of the ASP.NET MVC framework for the v5 release.  At Codegarden this was the announcement that generated the greatest buzz.  At the Core Team retreat this was the focus of our discussions and some prototypes were created to prove the proof of concept.  This is a very exciting direction for Umbraco and one that you'll no doubt see many more posts and discussions about in the coming year.

Scale and Momentum

Finally, as an attendee of past Codegardens one could not miss that the scale of the event was actually, well, big.  I think this year (2009) marks the point at which the Umbraco Project is bigger than Niels, or the Core Team, it is truly a community project that is made by, and for, the people that use it.  I see this as a tremendous accomplishment and one that is irreversible. 

  See you next year!

0 comment(s) for “Umbraco Codegarden09 Wrap Up”