WordCamp ABQ has been over for weeks now and it is high time I blog about it. Right? Right.

We kicked the WCABQ2013 off with a rockin’ hackathon organized by a fantastic local volunteer, Brooks Walsh.

Wait, what’s a hackathon? Well, hackathons can take several different shapes, ours is essentially an effort to create a website from start to finish for a local organization that needs help. This year we selected a local charter school, Corrales International School, in need of a redo since their old site was built in Joomla.

Our hackathon is fun, it is intense, we run behind, we catch up, and it always turns out great. This year we had a core team that really kept it together till the bitter end. Other folks in the community came by to lend a hand as well. Running concurrently is a Meet & Greet for attendees and speakers. We do these events at the same time for a couple of reasons. One, folks want to meet and greet and two, lots of attendees may not think they can take part in a hackathon and this is a way for them to see the work going on. It’s a community effort and everyone benefits.

Here are the pics:

Our caliber of hackers this year was amazing, Brooks really brought together a fantastic team. They were able to get everything sorted, even including a plugin at the last minute to add a teacher role. The plugin messed some things up: the menu got deleted and some redundant data appeared, but the team was able to revert everything and fix it all up with only minor rebuilding.

As always, we learn how to do things better for future hackathons. For example, we elected to use a theme to save time, but we used one that nobody was familiar with so that slowed the work up a bit. Another thing that slowed our work was experimenting with using the client’s web hosting space for the development site. Once we figured out this was going nowhere, the team figured out a workable solution, sticking the dev site on Dreamhost temporarily.

In the end, an organization in need of a website received a pretty great start.

Want more info about WCABQ? Take a look at the website.