The 4th Venda Developer Workshop took place on April 18th at the very impressive and accomodating venue of Kings Place. We were pleased to welcome over 50 developers on the morning, making this our biggest workshop yet.
With registration opening at 9.30, guests were greeted with breakfast to kick off the day, offering up the first opportunity to mingle with fellow developers and the Venda team. This was followed by an introduction from Venda COO Damon Mannion, before jumping straight into the first of the days 12 presentations, with the Venda team approaching the topics of the’ Venda Template Release v13′ and ‘Applying Bootstrap to the Venda Control Panel’. It was then over to Template Surgery where clients had the opportunity to quiz Venda developers about their queries surrounding the VCP.
The second part of our day offered up presentations on Venda APIs, before our first guest speaker of the day, Rob Smith of Blueleaf, took his chance to share an Externally Configured Products case study on Venda client, Laura Ashley. This was followed by an introduction to Venda In Store, before everyones favourite part of the day…lunch
The afternoon saw the focus switch to our main theme of the day, Responsive Web Design; with presentations from our Venda developers, an amusingly honest presentation on the perils of Responsive Design from Alex Sexton of LN-CC and Chris Marshall of On State sharing on the novel ways you can manipulate a Venda Site with URL parameters, before rounding the day off nicely with Venda co-founder and CTO James Cronin talking us through the Venda Development Roadmap. Attendees were once again given the opportunity to quiz the Venda team in a final Q&A session before unwinding in the bar, discussing the days events.
Throughout the day our attendees were Tweeting using the hashtag #vendadevconf sharing their thoughts on the days activity and networking together in their excitment. Below are some of our favourite Tweets of the day!
@VendaUK #vendadevconf my first workshop and realising what benefits I can bring to my organisation being aware of new things. Great!! – Vijay Yadav @vyadav1
Exciting prospects with the new Venda APIs and sign on… mobile apps and configurable products? Noice #vendadevconf - Ellis Grouse @_egrouse
Great example of good UX on Venda In Store . Impressed! #Vendadevconf - Eder Agostinho @gustin8
Interesting talks at #vendadevconf @VendaUK have made massive progress with in-store functionality and improvements to their VCP backend – Ramsay Bell @ramsaybell
Tweets about “#vendadevconf”
Of course no workshop day would be complete without a few prizes! We would like to offer our congratulatios to Joe Akers Douglas, who’s involvment in the day saw him take home the much coveted Ven-Guin (that’s a Venda Penguin, FYI.) and who’s continuous participation in the developers forum saw him awarded with a brand new Google Nexus 7; a good day all round for Joe! Our second Google Nexus 7 of the day was gifted to Ederson Agostinho of Total Jobs Group for his excitable contributions to the Twitter hashtag throughout the day. One particular tweet that caught the eye of the Venda team was;
Hayley’s presentation my favourite so far, love her “lady bug” outfit too 
#Vendadevconf
Flattery will get you everywhere with the Venda team! 
Other prizes were also offered out for best questions throughout the Q&A sessions, so congratulations to all of our winners from the day!
We would like to thank all who attended, with a special thanks to our guest presenters. The presentation slides and videos will be available to all who attended in the coming weeks. We hope you all enjoyed the day, and we look forward to seeing you all at the next Venda Developer Workshop.
