This years edition of the Inspiring Conference (formerly known as Inspiring Flow Conference or FLOW3 Experience) really started with a big bang: a huge two minutes laser show with elements from famous movies like Matrix, Tron and 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was the first conference I’ve ever attended which started with a laser show! And the quality of the conference continued like this: really inspiring presentations, nice talks, awesome location and catering! With more than 250 participants from more than ten countries, some as far as Cambodia or India, the conference was completely sold out.
In a short introduction Ben van’t Ende, the TYPO3 community manager who sees himself more like a Chief Happiness Officer, encouraged the community to never forget about the social capital of all the people involved in the project. We are all afraid to fail but we should not stop to innovate and step forward. „Just do it, don’t wait for others to do it“. In communications we should always assume best intent. We are all human beings and need to listen to each other.
Keynote
In his keynote Robert Lemke, project founder and lead of TYPO3 Flow and TYPO3 Neos, told about the growing success of the Flow framework. Projects like Famly, Opeepl or Familiensache already launched successfully using TYPO3 Flow. He also perceived a increasing amout of inquiries for coaching and training. Since May 2012 there have been at least 43,200 downloads of TYPO3 Flow. The current TYPO3 Flow 2.2 beta got a lot of speed improvements and bugfixes. Resource management has been postponed to version 2.3 since the focus currently lies on TYPO3 Neos.
TYPO3 Neos is a huge success in terms of attention the project got and still gets. Tweets like the one by Mark Boulton, a UK based designer with 30,000 followers really pushed the perception forward:
There is a lot of interest by people, who didn’t work with TYPO3 CMS before. Since the first stable release of Neos back in October 2013 there have been 19,000 downloads so far. A prominent example of TYPO3 Neos being used is the Centurion Magazine by American Express. Robert Lemke again urged the community to talk about project being done with Neos and to continue to spread the word.
The things that people asked most for Neos are speed, translation and access rights. The upcoming version 1.1 of Neos will address speed improvements and bugfixes. There have been huge improvements. The following version 1.2 will get either the translation or the access rights feature depending on what’s finished first. There is no fixed release cycle for Neos. When a feature is ready, a new version will be published. Neos 1.1 beta will probably come this week.
The translation feature will no only cover the localization of websites but also content dimensions with support for personas and devices. See details further down below in the talk by Sebastian Kurfürst. Access rights and ACLs will be available for backend and frontend users.
Last Robert Lemke pointed to the amount of work which is done by the Neos team. Each core team members invests about 2.5 weeks worth of holiday in the Caribbean per year into the project.
At the end of the keynote, Dan Frost introduced „The Neos Book„, a campaign to publish a printed book about TYPO3 Neos to give people the confidence that Neos is a good tool to use. Next week the table of contents will probably be published. This will be followed by a Kickstarter campaign to get the book funded. For more information you can follow @NEOSBook or subscribe on www.theneosbook.com.
The talks
The conference started with a talk by Christian Müller, who is community contact for the Neos project. He outlined that Neos is not only a web content management system but a web based content management system meant for multi channel publishing. In an entertaining way Christian explained the features of Neos and the techniques used. Neos is very modular. So the Neos team provides the blocks and we can put them together as needed. He also gave some statistics: roughly 60 contributors, 4,800 commits and 100,000 lines of code (just in Neos).
Afterwards Sebastian Kurfürst continued with A head start into TypoScript 2.0. In TYPO3 CMS TypoScript is a overall configuration language. TypoScript 2.0 in Neos is only meant for page rendering and has been completely rewritten. It has very powerful components like Eel and FlowQuery which make it possible to create websites without the need to write plugins, at least for most cases. To sum it up: TypoScript 2 is even more awesome than in TYPO3 CMS.
Martin Helmich then showed how to run TYPO3 Flow on HipHop VM which is quite a challenging task. Currently it needs some compatibility patches to actually run but the benchmarks are impressive!
The first talk about a real world project with Flow was by Tim Numan and Jesper Paardekooper on How Flow helps us save the world. They have built a scalable REST API for the backend and a single page application with AngularJS and TYPO3 Flow for the frontend of EcoChain.
Next up was Domain Event – the hidden gem of DDD by Henrik Møller Rasmussen who showed us how to split the system into smaller modules and bounded contexts and how to put business logic into the domain models.
Afterwards Karsten Dambekalns explained what considerations and preparations should be done before considering to migrate content from TYPO3 CMS to TYPO3 Neos. It’s not an easy task and requires a lot of time, but it’s possible. In the future there will be a package to help people migrate their content.
The last talk of the first day was a live hacking session by Robert Lemke to demonstrate how to create a Neos based website without plugins. The node types really can be extended easily.
The second day of the conference started with a talk by Sebastian Bergmann, a well known speaker in the PHP community and creator of PHPUnit, about the The Driven Developer. Today there are several ways of „driven development“ like Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD). The presentation showed very well the pros and cons of each method.
Next Christopher Hlubek gave us a practical guide to Behavior-Driven Development with Behat and TYPO3 Flow which fitted perfect to the previous talk.
The TYPO3 Neos Node Kingdom was presented by Dominique Feyer. First he showed how to structure the content of a website which is really important in TYPO3 Neos since we need to leave the idea of only pages with records behind us. Then the creation of node types with TypoScript 2 was explained. This talk was really encouraging not to worry too much about all the new techniques but simply give it a try.
The second talk by Henrik Møller Rasmussen about CQRS!=Event Sourcing fitted perfectly to his talk from the first conference day. CQRS stands for Command Query Responsibility Segregation. There are lots of gains to be made with CQRS without introducing the complexity of event sourcing.
Marco Klawonn undoubted had the most entertaining task about his dark patterns on fakeperformance. With many optical or technical tricks or improved wording you can lead the visitor to believe the website has faster response times.
Afterwards Christian Jul Jensen mused about the lessons he learned during the building of opeepl.com with TYPO3 Flow 2.0. He especially emphasized the help he got by other community members via the Freenode IRC channel #typo3-flow.
The conference started with a big bang laser show and ended with a big bang talk about translation in TYPO3 Neos by Sebastian Kurfürst. He introduced the translation handling which will arrive in TYPO3 Neos 1.2 or 1.3. The API itself without a user interface will be available in Neos 1.1 already. The concept of content dimensions not only enables translation but also special versions of a website depending on the target group and/or the device. This concept earned a lot of approval by the audience and was handled as the next big thing in the CMS market.
This is how translation and content dimensions might be implemented in Neos (click to enlarge).
Slides
- Keynote – Robert Lemke
- Neos 101 – Christian Müller
- A head start into TypoScript 2.0 – Sebastian Kurfürst
- Bringing the Elephant up to speed – Running TYPO3 Flow on HipHop VM – Martin Helmich
- How Flow helps us save the world – Tim Numan & Jesper Paardekooper
- Domain Event – the hidden gem of DDD – Henrik Møller Rasmussen
- Migrating from TYPO3 CMS to TYPO3 Neos – Karsten Dambekalns
- Look Ma, no Plugins! – Robert Lemke (live hacking, no slides)
- The Driven Developer – Sebastian Bergmann
- A practical guide to BDD with Behat and Flow – Christopher Hlubek
- Node Kingdom – Dominique Feyer
- CQRS!=Event Sourcing – Henrik Møller Rasmussen
- Fakeperformance – Marco Klawonn
- Building Opeepl: Trials and triumphs of a Flow 2.0 project – Christian Jul Jensen
- Polyglot Neos: Localisation in Neos 1.2 – Sebastian Kurfürst
Missing slides will be added as soon as I get notice of them. There will be recordings of the talks which will be published by the organizers of the conference successively in the next days.
Conclusion
This was again a really inspiring conference. The talks were well-balanced and show the high dedication of the community to help making TYPO3 Flow and Neos at least as successful as it’s sister project TYPO3 CMS.
Pictures of the event are available here, here and here. More pictures are sure to follow.
Big kudos to all the people at TechDivision who have organized a fantastic conference and of course to all speakers. And for next year: more lasers!
abc am 31. März 2014 um 17:52
konstantin am 06. April 2014 um 14:01
