I've been meaning to write this post since Sunday evening, but things just kept getting in my way. This past weekend (10/16 – 10/18) I had the privilege to volunteer at Coders for Charities (C4C). Like I said in a previous post, I viewed this as an opportunity to use some skills and experience that I have built up over time to a community that has given me loads in return.
C4C (at least the way it was set up this year) was a 72 hour event where the geeks of St. Louis got together and cranked out some code for much deserving charities. This year, the majority of the participating charities needed website work. As a matter of fact, the majority of the site work was done using either SiteFinity and DotNetNuke.
I was able to snag a spot on the United Way's project team, which was to convert three of their web sites to DotNetNuke. The team, which was led by Scott Spradlin, consisted of myself, Mark Cooper, Jack Menge, Shanti Nutheti and Brian Schroer. With the assistance of Jim House, the United Way's liason and our final developer, we began working on a project that I would normally estimate to take longer than two and a half days.
Eventually, word leaked out about me being involved in the St. Louis DotNetNuke Community, as well as participating on the Documents Module team. I spent Friday night describing and providing examples of how DotNetNuke can be used to the benefit of charities by making it easier to build and manage content to two of the coding teams. I hold the St. Louis development community in pretty high esteem, so I was pretty shocked when people were actually listening to me about this. Apparently, things went over so well on Friday night that another team decided to implement their project in DotNetNuke, rounding out the number of DNN projects to three.
After a pretty interesting night of talking, I made it in on Saturday with another request to explain how DotNetNuke worked. After a brief tutorial, I spent the remainder of the morning helping teams get brought up to speed on some means/methods of skin development and site management. During the afternoon I spent a lot of time floating between the three projects, devoting the bulk of my time to helping walk my team through DotNetNuke content management and skin development. Towards the end of the day, I realized that when Geeks band together to get something done, it gets done and quickly. We had migrated the majority of the content from each site in less than three hours and had a decent enough skin for two of the sites, and a good beginning on the third.
Sunday came, and we managed to finalize two of the three skins, but ran into some issues that prevented us from promoting the final skin. I'm trying to help now to finalize that skin for the United Way. All in all, the weekend was an awesome experience. I helped promote DotNetNuke, got to know a few people, and helped a charity.
A special thanks to Kevin Grossnicklaus and Muljadi Budiman for setting this event up. Here's a listing of pictures and related blog posts: