MuraCon 2017 Recap

MuraCon 2017 wrapped up Friday night. (I took the weekend off from technical things and basically regrouped for a couple days, catching on on family/home tasks that had been neglected while I prepared for the conference. Hence my writing up the recap today.)

From my vantage point it seemed like the conference was a big success. All the standard things (food, venue, schedules, etc) was all the quality you’d expect and the speakers were great as well. There was a good mix of marketing and technical sessions (for both front and back-end development). Despite the name “MuraCon”, the conference really isn’t entirely Mura specific content. Aside from a few references to Mura or MXP, I think everything in the Digital Marketing track was pretty platform agnostic information.  While the Developer track was more specific to Mura, there was also quite a bit of other information discussed — session topics included Gulp and Webpack, CKEditor, Vue, React, Polymer and so on.  It’s not just about Mura and it’s not just for developers — tell your friends. :)

Everything at the conference ran smooth, talks were mostly on time, most presenters filled their time slots accordingly, etc.  There were a couple minor A/V issues on day 1, but the team seemed to resolve those by mid-day.  (I believe every session was recorded and will be posted on line later.)

Both of my talks went pretty well, fortunately; both were brand new talks written specifically for this year’s MuraCon (though I’m happy to give them again elsewhere if anyone would like).  I saw no “clunker” talks; everyone clearly had worked really hard to deliver some great presentations!

A few days before the conference I had a big “light bulb” moment about both of my presentations, and essentially deleted big chunks of both and rewrote them. I think it turned out for the best; I was much happier with the versions that I gave rather than what I had in earlier drafts.  Though because I was constantly thinking about and tweaking my slide decks, I didn’t take many notes during the other sessions this year.  I’ve posted my notes from the “SEO Best Practices” talk; I’ll try to write more notes at the next conference I attend.

Someone actually recognized me at MuraCon as “the guy who takes all the conference notes; feedback like that is incredibly helpful! Now that I know people read these things, I’ll try to continue doing it!  So on that note, here’s your friendly reminder: if you find things people have contributed to the community helpful, tell them so. :)

Other notes of interest for me included:

* Eddie Ballisty’s talk on “Hardening Mura” mentioned several settings in Mura I wasn’t aware of, and reminded me to spend some time learning more about Portcullis as well.

* Tom Rusling's talk on SEO Best Practices was well worth venturing into the Marketing room for an hour. ;) I learned a ton of new tips and finally got several long overdue questions of my own answered. You can view my notes from Tom's talk here.

* Ryan Watts is always a great speaker. I attended his second talk at Mura Con and learned a ton about Vue and using Mura as a headless CMS.

* Grant Shepert’s discussion about Form Builder and the upcoming (exact name TBD) “Quiz Builder” provided a lot of great info about where those features are going in Mura.

* FYI: the “Email Broadcaster” and “Mailing List” features in Mura are going to be deprecated soon.  During the Day 2 Keynote they announced this along with a comment encouraging users to find alternate tools for those features so they’re not stuck unable to upgrade Mura. I’d heard about this (at last year’s MuraCon?) and have been looking for an excuse to start building a better Email Manager Plugin for Mura — I think I just got my excuse. :)

* Evan Dunham’s discussion of his LaunchPad CSS toolkit showed several great tips on how to really maximize the usefulness of Sass when building new websites and still keeping everything organized so overrides and customizations are easy to address.

…and lots of other plans for Mura in the coming future.

Thanks to Evan at Blue River, I found a new tool (Reveal.js) for building slide decks that I’m really enjoying. I’d been anchored to LibreOffice for years and my only real complaint about it was the lack of built-in themes that look appropriate for technical talks.  I used Reveal.js to build both slide decks and really found it easy to use.  Granted I didn’t delve into many of the features, but I was up and running and able to customize what I needed pretty easily.

Thanks to everyone that attended or otherwise helped. See you all again next year!

-nolan

PS. Coincidentally (no really, I swear), this Wednesday is my SacInteractive User Group meeting, and the topic is “An Intro to Mura CMS”.  More details at sacinteractive.com.