workshops
Our Workshops take place Wednesday, April 13 at the Poynter Institute in downtown St. Petersburg. Poynter offers us a specialized venue for comfortable learning in a beautiful space.
Craft Commerce
Workshop Description
Craft Commerce is here, and it’s amazing! In this three-hour workshop, Luke will demonstrate some of the features that set Commerce apart as we build a new e-commerce site from scratch. We’ll be covering core concepts like Product Types, Variants, and Shipping Methods, front-end topics like product listings and checkout workflows, and we’ll touch on Commerce’s rich extensibility features with a bit of custom plugin development. By the time we’re done, you’ll be ready to take on that next e-commerce project with confidence!
Workshop Requirements
Please come prepared with a laptop running the latest version of Craft CMS and Craft Commerce. Both are free downloads on craftcms.com and craftcommerce.com.
Business Workshop
Workshop Description
For the first time at Peers, we're presenting a business workshop like no other. Join your fellow business-owners and entrepreneurs for an afternoon of small presentations, breakout sessions and panels.
As the businesses in our community grow and evolve, we see common challenges: how to scale and hire effectively, how to buy and sell software, how to calculate risk and maintain business stability, and how to deal with the stresses of it all.
Join the conversation and benefit from your Peers in the room - who have been there before and are here to help. Get ready to roll up your sleeves, and get down to business.
We will publish a complete speaker participation list once finalized.
Space is limited – Register Now
Optimize your frontend workflow for large-scale web projects
Workshop Description
When building out large-scale web projects, there’s a lot to nail down before implementing the backend. Whether you design the majority of your web project in a graphics editor such as Sketch or Photoshop, or tackle design decisions directly in the browser, you inevitably end up spending a large portion of the project on frontend development. This workshop will introduce you to modern tools and techniques you can use to optimize your frontend development workflow, allowing you or your team to reduce repetitive tasks and save valuable time when building out the frontend of your projects.
Here are some ways you’ll be able to apply the techniques you’ll learn in this workshop:
- Get user feedback on features before putting expensive development time into them
- Nail your frontend code for responsive design decisions before transitioning into backend development
- Deliver a frontend style guide or even an entire framework to marketing teams or backend developers
- Focus on your frontend architecture and implementation before dealing with backend development
- Thoroughly test your design decisions or collaborate with other designers
Who is this workshop for?
- Frontend developers who want to explore ways to optimize their workflow and prototyping techniques
- Designers who want to learn what is involved in today’s frontend development roles
- Designers who are also frontend developers who want to test their design concepts quickly in the browser
- Agencies who are looking for ways to allow designers and developers to collaborate more effectively
- Backend developers or CMS developers who also do frontend template development
Workshop Requirements
Please come prepared with a laptop running the latest version of Node and Gulp installed. Here are some quick instructions if you don’t already have them.
- Install Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/download/
- Get the lowdown on NPM: https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/what-is-npm
- Install Gulp: https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/blob/master/docs/getting-started.md (follow step 1)
Modernizing your EE install - Best Practices to adapt your sites to ExpressionEngine 3
Workshop Description
We’re an industry that values the cutting edge, where speed and iteration are paramount. And yet for a lot of websites, the first iteration is the one that sticks around for years. How do you breathe new life into these aging sites? And how do you take the new skills you’ve learned over the years and apply them to old ExpressionEngine sites even when a total rewrite is not in the budget?
If you find yourself with:
- your own site, untouched in years
- a client looking for a refresh
- a site you've inherited from another developer
- an ailing site you've been asked to fix
- a site acquired by purchase or merger
This workshop will cover how to painlessly update and modernize any of them. .
From bespoke add-ons, to PHP in templates, to abandonware, you may be facing unfamiliar and out-of-date code. Do you update, or do you start from scratch and salvage the old data you need? We will cover the pros and cons of both and how to make a decision that makes the most sense for the client—and your sanity. We’ll cover the most important API changes in ExpressionEngine 3 and how to apply them. Learn how to update add-ons that are no longer supported and how to make sure your future self can easily maintain and rely on that code.
And, we’ll look ahead. This isn't your father's ExpressionEngine. Now that you've converted the site, here’s your chance to give it some modern polish, and create new habits for site builds. You’ll come away with a new approach and the tools you need to tackle your sites going forward.
Wednesday, April 13
9:30am - 12:30pm