After day 2 of the ExpressionEngine class In Holland, I’m more excited than ever.  This has been a fabulous experience.  The hospitality that Mike Boyink and Collective Idea have extended to us has been above and beyond the norm.

About the class so far; there is a wide range of EE users in the class.  Some have never used EE before, while others have quite a bit of experience building sites with EE and well as other content management systems.  Nobody seemed bored with the elementary stuff, and yet nobody appeared overwhelmed with the nuts and bolts of EE.  Mike has done a great job of keeping the class focused, on track, and everybody on the same page.  Today we started building the architecture of the site by building new template groups, and using EE tags and variables to build navigation and pull in weblog data dynamically.  I can’t wait for the next two days of the workshop and to interact with a great group of people.

Mike Boyink from Train-ee is hosting the first ever classroom led instruction of ExpressionEngine (EE) in Holland, Michigan.  I stumbled across EE about two years ago, after thinking I was going to become a bad #!*$ developer overnight, and reading every book I could on web development.  After comparing content management systems, I chose EE.  What I found two years ago, was there were not many tutorials, or trainings on EE.  Yea there was the documentation and four start up videos, but it seemed like something was missing, I was still was very unsure of how to really develop an ExpressionEngine site. I put EE on the shelf and went in a different direction of building systems from scratch(or attempting anyway).  I still new that EE was the tool to be using, especially for clients websites, although may not be the most popular, I re-visited ExpressionEngine again.  This time while trying to find tutorials, I found Mike Boyink, and his books on ExpressionEngine.  This is exactly what I had been looking for.  After reading and watching the screencasts, I finally have a better understanding of EE, but like always I had some more questions. Continuing to research, I saw Mike Boyink was offering a workshop on ExpressionEngine in September.