CiviCon 2014 will take place April 24, 2014 and April 25, 2014 in San Francisco--less than five weeks away. CiviCon is the world’s largest CiviCRM Meetup. Each year CiviCRM developers gather to discuss the recent developments in CiviCRM. Skvare is a gold sponsor for CiviCon 2014. We're actively involved in the CiviCRM community, hosting Meetups and always contributing to the open-source community. In addition, Skvare’s own Peter Petrik and Mark Hanna will be there to give presentations and lead workshops.

There will be a Pre-Conference Discovery Session, which will be hosted by Peter. For this free conference, Peter will give an overview on CiviCRM, and why it is useful for meeting the needs of nonprofits and civi-sector organizations.  

Peter will host his first topic, “Hosting Options and Performance Improvements” on Thursday, April 24, 2014 from 11:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. He’ll walk developers through how to choose from a myriad of shared hosting options. This means asking the right questions so that you can determine which option you need to choose from (shared hosting, VPS, managed instances, dedicated servers, and even CiviCRM-specific providers) for the optimal performance of your website. He’ll also discuss one-click installs, setting up your own environment, and everything in between.

Peter will present his second topic, “ Importing Large Datasets”, on Friday, April 25, 2014 from 14:45 to 16:00. Peter’s workshop will teach you how to use CiviCRM's built in import functionality to prepare, load and validate large datasets. He’ll also provide a review of options such as Kettle, direct SQL queries, CiviCRM’s built-in php code bypassing the GUI, and more.

Mark will present “CiviCRM Entities: Creating Enhanced Event Info and Registration including Openlayers mapping pages” on Thursday, April 24, 2014 from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Developers can use Drupal’s site-building techniques to combine the display of any Drupal entity and CiviCRM data to create a seamless, augmented interface. For this presentation, he’ll demonstrate how to create an event page that includes tabs containing CiviCRM data.

Finally, Peter and Mark will also participate in the Lake Tahoe Sprint from April 27, 2014 to May 4, 2014. They'll collaborate to improve CiviCRM and meet others in the community. 

We’ll also be there to attend other presentations, demonstrations, and discussion groups over the two days. We’ll also host a Meetup on May 8, 2014 recapping CiviCon 2014. Hopefully we'll see you there!