Plain Black and WebGUI at YAPC::NA 2008

June 19th, 2008 - YAPC::NA 2008 (Yet Another Perl Conference) has come to a close and it was a huge success. As always, it was a great conference where hundreds of Perl programmers from around the world gathered to teach, learn, and collaborate on a variety of Perl-related topics. In addition, it was particularly exciting for Plain Black Corporation and their WebGUI content management system because of all the extra attention they received.

At the opening of the conference, The Perl Foundation announced they would be moving their donation management to Donor.com and use WebGUI as the platform for their new website. This was a great start to the conference for Plain Black as hundreds of attendees were present for this announcement.

Day two of the conference was equally exciting as the President of Plain Black Corporation, JT Smith, hosted a 4 hour developer workshop. This session was completely full and even had people bringing in chairs to sit in the back of the room. The session taught attendees how to install, configure, and then develop applications in the WebGUI content management system. Feedback from attendees was very positive overall and many stated they would continue to evaluate and test the CMS for use in their businesses and organizations.

After the workshop, Plain Black participated in the job fair and expo. A diverse group of staff were on hand to answer questions, recruit Perl programmers, run WebGUI demos, and give out the famous "Gooey" mascot dolls. (Note: Gooey is the community mascot for WebGUI) During the exhibit hours, Plain Black staff met with several people who were interested in using WebGUI at their organizations. They also discovered that another high profile university had been using WebGUI for quite some time. The University of Nebraska at Omaha has departments that use WebGUI to display content, organize information, and help staff collaborate effectively.

"Because WebGUI is free and downloaded over 5000 times a month, we're always hearing about new organizations that are using it." says Tavis Parker, Vice President of Marketing at Plain Black Corporation. "However, we've seen a strong trend lately with several major universities and K-12 school districts adopting WebGUI as their CMS and application framework of choice."

Day three of the conference included 2 additional training sessions by JT Smith. In total, Smith performed over 5.5 hours of training at YAPC::NA 2008. His presentations were innovative, useful, and had some references to WebGUI which provided additional exposure to the product and community. With all things considered, Plain Black Corporation was very pleased with the opportunities at the conference and was proud to be a Bronze Sponsor at this year's event.