MuraCon Recap

February 22, 2016

MuraCon wrapped up on Friday night, the proverbial dust has settled, and I have a few minutes to type up some thoughts on the conference.

Overall I think it was a very successful event. I don’t believe it was completely sold out, there was a very respectable number of attendees. The Sheraton Grand was a great venue — very clean and elegant, plenty of nearby parking, food was great, staff were all very nice and helpful. Being local, I didn’t have a hotel room, but from what I know this hotel has a good reputation overall, I can’t imagine there were many problems.

MuraCon started with Malcolm giving the Keynote session, giving a bit of history about Blue River, and high level overviews of new things coming in Mura 7, the Mura Experience Platform. Mura is 15 years old now, and powering roughly 15,000 websites. The 3 “main” websites (for Mura CMS, Experience, and Intranet products) will be getting combined into 1, so it's easier to find resources as needed.

Throughout both days there were several more general sessions providing further info about Mura 7 and the Mura Experience Platform (which looks interesting, though given my current client base, I don’t foresee a personal need for that product in my near future). All attendees were given hefty doses of what's coming in the new versions of both products.

Among other things, Mura 7 will include a fully responsive Admin screen (though support for phones is still in progress, but tablet size devices should work well). There's also a new and improved Form Builder which ties in to new MuraORM features as well. Personally I'm most interested in the MuraORM features, as those are what I'm using currently (and seeing what Blue River is adding gave me some ideas for a similar project I've been working on lately). Content scheduling and Display Objects are also both getting improvements. There is a pretty massive set of new features and changes coming in version 7!

The presentations were all well put together and professional. Highlights for me included Clinton Howell's talk on Group Development With Mura. Clinton gave a great balance of info on using Vagrant, Git, and how to deal with “real world” Mura sites in a Git repo. CMS based projects are a challenge to integrate into a version control system.; Clinton’s talk helped shed light on a few questions I’ve had about the process as well as some further insight about Vagrant. This was extremely informative.

Ryan Watts gave an an excellent talk about integrating Mura and Docker. This talk was full of great content. It got a little over my head at times, but that’s more to my being new to Docker than anything. If you’re looking to learn more about Docker (either with or without Mura integration) I’d recommend checking out Ryan’s preso.

Thanks to Steve Withington for coordinating the lion's share of what it took to put this conference together. Nice seeing/meeting/chatting with everyone again. Hopefully another MuraCon happens again next year.

-nolan