For the forth time the Inspiring Conference about TYPO3 Neos and Flow related topics took place on March 27th and 28th in Kolbermoor near Munch. This years edition of this international event was attended by almost 270 participants from 12 countries.
The two conference days were packed with great talks, the catering was awesome as usual and there was a lot of time for smalltalk.
A list of all available slides from the talks can be found at the end of this article.
Keynote
The conference was opened with a keynote by Stefan Willkommer about the interaction of content and commerce. The borders between become blurred more and more and it is already well know that multi channel publishing is the next big thing on the web. Also it is important to keep in mind that marketing is about the stories you tell. Stefan referred to the story about eBay auctions were simple used items were sold with a higher revenue only because of the great story that was told in the article description.
According to Stefan, TYPO3 Neos is the right tool to cover the gap between content and commerce. It’s now important to create momentum and spread the word.
In the second part of the keynote Robert Lemke talked about past, present and future of Flow and Neos. So far there have been 15 releases of Flow and Neos. The latest improvements like multi language support and an improved performance were very important for agencies.
For the future, the Neos team wants to integrate more contributors. To lower the barriers to contribute code there will be a change of the license of TYPO3 Flow towards the MIT license and a switch from Gerrit to Github. There will be no requirement for signing a CLA before getting commit rights any more. With these changes the Neos community wants to be more effective, open and friendly.
Furthermore Robert talked about why he, Karsten Dambekalns and Christian Müller founded the company Flownative and which role the company is planned to take as help-desk for other companies using Neos.
A new roadmap with the next goals to create more value for the users of Neos can be found on the Neos website.
Embrace the Cloud
This talk by Henrik Møller Rasmussen was about Amazon Web Services offers for cloud hosting. Unfortunately there were almost no hints on how to use Flow or Neos with theses services and how to circumvent potential problems. But the usage of AWS is said be ridiculous cheap …
Codecoon – a technical Case Study
Codecoon is a new hosting platform developed by punkt.de. The talk by Fabian Stein & Michael Lihs explained how the portal was implemented using TYPO3 Flow, Opscode Chef, Vagrant and Sinatra. One already useable component of the Codecoon portal is a virtual machine with Neos which is available for download.
Tasty Recipes for Every Day
The talk by Aske Ertmann offered a great collection of very useful hints for the every day use of TYPO Neos. In my opinion, this was one of the best and most useful talks of the whole conference. Just have a look at his slides which should become the start of some kind of knowledge base!
Security 2.0
Andreas Förthner & Bastian Waidelich talked about architectural decisions and which patterns turned out to fit best for them while building the improved security framework in Neos.
How a PHP based multithreaded infrastructure enables real enterprise environments
Stefan Willkommer showed how they used appserver.io to run big websites with Neos.
Assets in the Cloud
Robert Lemke presented the new cloud-capable asset management which was in the making for almost tow years and will finally be available in Flow 3.0 and Neos 2.0. With its companion, the new Media package, it provides a sophisticated but easy-to-use API for developers to manage media assets.
The future of Content Management
In their talk, Daniel Hinderink & Rasmus Skjoldan talked on how they think Neos should be positioned in the CMS market. They think that COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) is more important than personalization and propagated COPE and Neos as the mix-deck for all kinds of content, regardless if structured or not to be published everywhere.
Together with their talk they published the public beta of their vision as the „COPE manifesto„.
Test-Driven Domains
The second day of the conference was opened with a keynote by Sebastian Bergmann & Stefan Priebsch. Domain-Driven Design is an approach to software development that puts a strong focus on business value. Combining ideas of Domain-Driven Design and Test-Driven Development leads to a formalized representation of the ubiquitous language through production code and tests. The talk was quite entertaining.
Neos 1.3
Christian Müller presented the upcoming Neos version 2.0 which was formerly announced as version 1.3. But due to the fact that there will be a new PHP version requirement (PHP 5.5) and a lot of new features the Neos team decided to publish this version as 2.0.
Among the many new features are a localized user interface, an event log, improved security (see talk Security 2.0), a SEO package, improved user management and the new media module (see Assets in the Cloud talk).
Sawubona!
Karsten Dambekalns explained how multi language websites can be built with TYPO3 Neos. Together with the content dimension feature there can be arbitrary levels of personalized content. In future versions of Neos there will be a split screen feature to show the translation base and the new translation at once. Furthermore there will be import and export possibilities and translation tasks. But there is no fixed schedule for these features yet.
Two Stack CMS
Traditional content management systems conflate two diverse requirements into one single software: content creation and content delivery. This combined approach leads to complex systems that can hardly be optimized for either use case. Arne Blankerts & Robert Lemke showed the concept of a two-stack CMS as well as a proof-of-concept implementation based on Neos and other components.
Searching in Neos
Sebastian Kurfürst explained how to integrate ElasticSearch with Neos. For smaller projects there is also a SimpleSearch package which doesn’t require the installation of ElasticSearch.
Bringing TYPO3 legacy applications into the Flow
In his talk Martin Helmich showed some options how convert TYPO3 extenions to Flow packages. Additionally he provided a tool called „Metamorph“ intended for converting TYPO3 sites into TYPO3 Flow applications and (later) TYPO3 Neos sites.
One more thing
The „one more thing“ talk is intended become a regular event at every edition of the conference and should outline a few of the upcoming ideas, plans or features within the Neos project. This year, Robert Lemke and Aske Ertmann presented their ideas: For integrators there are plans to improve the content repository, sorting and filtering features, better undo/redo/soft deletion possibilities and a new demo package with a new design and updates examples. For newbies, the boarding hurdle should be lowered by introducing a „Welcome“ team which will roll out the red carpet. There are plans to provide an official Docker Container and improved shared hosting support. For developers there are plans for better dev tools like logging or a TypoScript2 browser and debugger.
On the user side there also a lot of plans. Structured editing with inline validation and help texts should make things easier. The publishing workflow will be extended with a review workflow. The user experience will be extended with an internal search and content translation improvements like the already mentioned split screen feature and a better content preview.
The project website at neos.typo3.org will become the central community hub with documentation, tips, snippets, guides, tutorials. There are ideas for an active blog, introduction videos, show cases a newbie contribution guide.
To archive all these plans there will be several teams for example for product strategy, welcoming new contributors and users, organizational stuff, javascript refactoring, css refactoring, user experience, the website, structured editing and the content repository.
Everyone should feel invited to use Neos and to contribute. Missing features should not stop you to use Neos. Just get in touch with the Neos team to negotiate how this feature can be included. In case you spot orphaned bugs or patches, nag the team to get focus on the topic.
List of all currently available slides and videos
- Neos: Past, Present, Future – Robert Lemke – Video of the Keynote
- Embrace the Cloud – Henrik Møller Rasmussen
- Codecoon – a technical Case Study – Fabian Stein & Michael Lihs
- Tasty Recipes for Every Day – Aske Ertmann
- Security 2.0 – Andreas Förthner & Bastian Waidelich
- How a PHP based multithreaded infrastructure enables real enterprise environments – Stefan Willkommer
- Assets in the Cloud – Robert Lemke
- The future of Content Management (according to Neos) – Daniel Hinderink & Rasmus Skjoldan
- Test-Driven Domains – Sebastian Bergmann & Stefan Priebsch
- Neos 1.3 (2.0) – Christian Müller – Videos
- Sawubona! – Karsten Dambekalns
- Two Stack CMS – Arne Blankerts & Robert Lemke
- Searching in Neos – Sebastian Kurfürst
- Bringing TYPO3 legacy applications into the Flow – Martin Helmich
Conclusion
The Inspiring Conference 2015 was again a very interesting event which was well organized. For my taste there should be more talks with tips and tricks for the every day use of Neos and less marketing talks like the ones for Amazon Web Services, Codecoon or appserver.io.
After the years of building up the current status of TYPO3 Neos, the Neos team now needs to concentrate on lowering the barriers for newbies, improved processes and an overall better user experience for both, integrators and users. 2015 will be a crucial year to prove, if Neos can be improved at the most important issues and can gain more momentum on both sides, developers and decision makers. There are a lot of plans but it also needs a lot of manpower to bring them to life. Building a strong community around Neos is essential for its success!
If YOU are willing to contribute in any way, just do it! If you lack support, nag the Neos team on IRC, Slack or via email.
Other reports and images from the Inspiring Conference 2015
- http://www.web-skyfillers.de/uber-uns/aktuelles/inspiring-conference-in-kolbermoor.html
- http://robertlemke.com/en/blog/typo3-neos-at-inspiring-conference-2015.html
- http://sandstorm-media.de/blog/inspiring-conference-2015.html
- http://blog.lobacher.de/2015/04/02/recap-inspiring-conference-2015/
- https://www.techdivision.com/blog/inspiring-conference-2015-ein-voller-erfolg/
- https://jweiland.net/aktuell/artikel/inspiring-conference-2015.html
- https://buzz.typo3.org/people/florian-weiss/article/something-neos-ix-dont-stop-believing/
- https://neos.typo3.org/news/keynote-and-product-vision-talks-from-inspiring-con-2015.html
- http://ttree.ch/live/blog/inspiring-conference-jour-1.html
- http://community-coa.ch/post/114756544853/inspiring-participation
- Impressions from the Inspiring Conference
- More impressions