It was very hot. It was a lot of fun. It ended in an Irish pub in Ghent. There were pictures taken, which have not yet made it online. There was video recorded, still on a tape waiting to be converted. Above all, it was magical to see people come together for the first time with a single purpose : to find out what one|content can mean for them.
It's kind of hard to summarize what happened, but I'll try anyway. The session started with a vision talk about how sites get built today, and why we felt one|content was necessary. As it turns out (and as the video will show, I hope) the approach we use is different yet familiar to all integrators present : it's what we would like to do in a project but never get round to doing, because technology gets in the way. With one|content, projects get defined and partially built in a matter of hours or days, while discussing with your customer.
Then, onto a real example. What better way than to pick a live subject ? Hans wanted to build a project portfolio, so we ran a 10-minute interview to scope out the schemes and relations for the data model. Then, we started building it. A projects table containing info on implementations, a customer table listing customers for whom projects are done. Projects live in the joomla world, but customers exist in another (MySQL) database. In 20 minutes time, we are navigating between projects and customers on the demo site, and we're linking (Joomla-based) projects to (externat database) customers. No code, I repeat : no code.
Everyone got to practice on the next scheme of the model, to see how easy it really is to build a model and create a view using nanoScript. We added the scheme for project partners and the many-to-many relationship with projects, including backend editing and frontend view to link the two, in another ten minutes. As Sheldon would say : bazinga.
Yes, I found it hard to believe, and judging from the looks on their faces, some of the participants also hit the hard wall of realisation that 'this stuff really works'.
We ended up discussing extensions like behaviors for versioning, publishing, geomapping ... and other goodies. Everyone will pick a subject and explore one|content further, and the September bootcamp promises to be a showcase of see-what-I-did-in-an-afternoon exercises.
In a nutshell - it was amazing to see professionals take to one|content like ducks to water. Tom and myself got a major kick out of it, and thanks to Hans, we've got a number of open issues to address in the next weeks. Stay tuned !