Last week Nate & I headed down to beautiful San Diego to participate in the San Diego Drupal Camp. San Diego is a fantastic place to visit in February, when most of the country is experiencing the bitter cold of winter. The locals pointed out that it wasn’t actually all that nice out, because “some people need to wear socks!”
Not only is the weather in San Diego worth writing home about, but SANDCamp is a special camp for Backdrop. Backdrop CMS received a prestigious Innovation Award from the SANDCamp organizers last year along with a few other deserving projects. Also at SANDCamp 2015, the first-ever Backdrop CMS training took place. It was a half-day workshop lead by Darius Garza and Ezenwa Isiogu. This year, we upgraded to a full-day training workshop.
This year’s workshop consisted of a follow-along site-building exercise in the morning, followed by a deep-dive into the code in the afternoon. (A class outline is available for anyone else who would like to give this class).
In the site building portion of class, we demonstrated differences from Drupal 7, including some of the usability improvements in Backdrop 1.3. We did a quick tutorial on views, a tour of layouts, and a demonstration of deploying changes using the new configuration management system.
In the afternoon we explained how the code in a Backdrop layout fits together to build a page. We pointed out the differences in building a Drupal 7 theme vs a Backdrop theme. We also ported a module from Drupal 7 to Backdrop, both the easy way (making it backdrop-compatible) and the hard way (creating a built-for-backdrop version.)
The class went very well, and everyone learned something new. Attendees ranged from expert Drupal developers, to content-editor-types who had not built a Drupal site before. Throughout the day we had lots of excellent questions from all of our participants.
We got to see our workshop attendees throughout the rest of the weekend as well, since everyone was absorbing as much information as they could from all the fabulous sessions that ran all day Friday and Saturday. The parties were also fun! Special thanks to Achieve Internet for showing off their fancy new office, and Pantheon for the drink tickets at Wonderland.
Thank you to camp organizers for putting on another fantastic event, and thanks of course to the sponsors for making the whole thing possible!