The ExpressionEngine meetup on March 24th was a great success and the BrilliantRetail (@brilliantretail) team was excited to be the sponsor! In typical ExpressionEngine fashion the awesome community of developers pitched it for a give away that included over $1000 in free add-ons. We'd like to personally thank DevDemon, EE-Garage, LibrarEE, Pixel & Tonic and Structure 3 for the donations.  In addition to great food, free drinks, and an abundance of giveaways the meetup was also honored to have EllisLab, Inc. CEO in attendance. 

About the Event

The night was themed "Show & Tell" and featured 3 developers talking about a site of their choice. Patrick Brumfield (@patbrumfield) started off the presentations in stellar fashion with an outline of how they leveraged the power of ExpressionEngine and the flexibility of the query module to create advanced search functionality for a real estate search site. Patrick was followed by Vik Youssefian who led off the presentation with some well done humor. Vik projected a picture of a really bad design on the screen and I know a few members of the audience, myself included, cringed at the horrible possibility of what was to come. He continued to introduce himself and the project he was going to present. Finally, he turned to the screen and said, "Here is the project before I started it!" I swear I heard more than one "thank goodness" and quite a few sighs of relief from the crowd. Vik went on to coin the phrase "technically curious."  The presentations were concluded by David Waite (@DaveWaite) who showed off some of the great new features they are building into their new company website. The presentation was focused on the frontend flexibility of ExpressionEngine and how easy it is to integrate jQuery. Brilliant2 (@brilliant2) co-founders Tony Jessup (@brilliantjessup) and David Dexter (@dpdexter) raffled off the add-ons.

A Message From The CEO 

The event was capped off with a message from EllisLab, Inc. CEO Leslie Camacho (@knight777). Leslie spoke about his vision in this new roll as CEO and about the direction of ExpressionEngine's future. We then held a question and answer period where he listened to and responded to a number inquires from the attendees. Click on the video below to watch for yourself.