C4C in Kansas City was, once again, an incredible event. There were about 8 charities and probably about 30 developers / designers. We even had our own film crew from KC VideoCore, there to document the event and record the “ninjas” at work. I had the privilege of helping the Focus North America team building an aggregate data interface for personal donation campaigns on the Focus North America Site. The experience taught me, first and foremost, that Joomla is my enemy, but even enemies can work together for good. We (the team) did manage to create a Joomla plug-in that allows Focus NA to place this view of aggregated data onto any page of the site, which was a very proud moment for me personally. I felt that I had conquered a formidable opponent in Joomla.
Joomla, however, was not without its last hurrah. 5 minutes to demo time the Joomla Virtual Appliance refused to get an IP address, making a demonstration of the the wonders we had stored within impossible to reach. Joomla may have won the battle, but I shall win the war! Stay tuned for the conclusion of this epic conflict…
In addition to the Joomla challenge, we were also able to help out a second charity, Mid America Freedom Band with their new site. This one allowed us to go back to our roots, and build the site using .NET and DotNetNuke. I must say that DotNetNuke has come a long way since I last explored it, which was very fortuitous for our team. We were able to very quickly whip together a website with all of the functionality that the Mid America Freedom Band needed.
Shout out to the team:
Lee, Becky, Ionut, James
Good times, good food, good Rock Band!
And we’ll do it all again next year.