The QCDUG folks have done it again. After a great Day of DotNetNuke last year, they stepped up their game and delivered an even better experience for the community for 2013, at Southern Fried DNN. Clint, Allen, Robb, Fred, and Ryan brought it all together, and made it happen. Allen & Robb were deservingly recognized by DNN for their unending community contributions by being inducted into the DNN MVP program. Congrats, guys!
I was invited to present two sessions this year at the event. I talked about Designing a Mobile-Enabling API, and Contributing to Open Source Projects on GitHub and CodePlex. The first talk went through what it looks like to create a web API via the DNN Services Framework in DNN 7. We talked about some of the considerations that services require to fit both the AJAX and native mobile application usages, primarily around authorization and authentication, but also around the design of the service endpoints.
The Open Source talk tried to lay out how important it is to make it easy for OSS project maintainers to take action on your contributions (whether those be bug reports, enhancement requests, or code patches). We also talked specifically about how to use git (and related tools) to make contributing easy.
A big theme that everyone seemed to be talking about this year was participating and contributing to the community. Chris Hammond gave an Ignite Session around the status of Open Source within the DotNetNuke community, and urged us all to contribute more, which really seemed to resonate with folks. I've heard a few folks talking about next steps to take personally and as a community to keep that train moving. I'm really excited to see where that goes.
As an attendee, I really enjoyed meeting and hearing Scott Wilkinson and Jeff McWherter (of Gravity Works) for the first time. These guys really seem to value solid development techniques, and I'm excited to have them in our community and to see more from them. I'm also coming away excited to start making use of DNN Content Items in DNN extensions, to create greater opportunity for mashups and data sharing, after hearing some more details from Jonathan Sheely. Reading back through, it sounds like there's a lot of stuff to be excited about in the DNN community!
Overall, I came away from the event excited about the direction of the community and hopeful for DNN's next steps. Maybe we'll see y'all in Palm Beach in October.