I posted before that I went to the first Form Function & Class mini-conference last October 30. This was organized by the fledging Philippine Web Designers Organization and they have a whole series of such mini-conferences. I wasn’t able to attend the November mini-conference and so I resolved to attend the January 22 event and to muster enough courage to actually give a talk (and I indicated so at the sign-up sheet, though I had no topic at hand then). Unfortunately, one week before the mini-conference, I still had no topic. After wracking my brain, I settled on giving an introduction to Textpattern, the content management system (CMS) that I’ve used on Vista Pinas and Blogenyo.

The vast majority of the self-hosted local bloggers use WordPress as their blogging CMS (as evidenced by the success of last year’s WordCamp Philippines), and so I thought that giving people a peek at an alternative CMS—one that has a cult following among some web designers—would prove educational. It was interesting because one of the other talks during last January’s event was about Concrete5, another CMS—one that is decidedly more flashy than down-to-earth Textpattern.

If you’re interested, you can download my presentation slides from the Form Function & Class server. I did the research and outline two days before the conference and stayed up almost all night on the eve of the conference finalizing the slides. I’m pretty satisfied with my slides given that I did it on such a small time frame. The only problem is that the slides’ text had too little contrast when projected. I kinda expected that, but didn’t anymore adjust the colors since I think it looks nice when viewed on a proper screen.

The talk went well (I think) and I don’t know if I’m lucky or not that I was the last speaker since the audience was too sleepy/tired to throw questions at me (and the speaker before me) after my talk which started at around 11 p.m. that time. Jan Pabellon, the presenter of Concrete5 and the first speaker, was put on the hot seat after his talk and so I did some last minute research on the Web in anticipation of questions for me that never did came. Well, one problem I did have is that I have no idea if my presentation was effective in its aim of introducing Textpattern and whether my delivery was ok.

Anyway, here is the list of the other speakers with links to their presentations:

• Starting out with Concrete5 by Jan Pabellon

• SEO and Web Design by Alfredo Palconit

• Pricing your web design work by Regnard Raquedan

• How to Write a Good ALT Text by Jojo Esposa

• Front-end Website Optimization by JP dela Torre

Kudos to the organizers for setting up such a successful event. There were plenty of attendees, sponsors, food, and interest. I’m already looking forward to the main Form Function & Class conference to be held at the Asian Institute of Management on July 10 later this year. See you there!