It has been more than a month now from the event so the topic is no longer in the spotlight, but I will do a late recap anyway. The main reason for such a big delay was, to be completely honest, no free time whatsoever. So I hope you find this post as a nice reminder on the event.
The Venue
Location was excellent: Cumberland hotel near the Marble Arch, a luxury hotel with great conference capabilities and nice restaurant. It was great to visit London though we were not used to the frenzic weather. I never saw rain and sun change so fast and so often in one day. Now I understand why English people carry their umbrellas all the time :).
The Event
Great speakers, interesting presentation, even better mingling. There is nothing more to say which is not already mentioned on the eZ Conference web, on the eZ Community web wrap up and on Vision blog.
What I want here is to check my blog post from last years conference in Berlin and compare it with this years impressions:
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In general, the direction of eZ Publish development is much clearer than last year. In Berlin we had a lot of uncertainty as 2 editions where announced: Enterprise and Community. It was a hard decision to make for eZ Systems and a huge step toward the Open Source business model that can be sustainable. Of course, good business and community leadership is a must for that to succeed.
- Last year a big topic was the code split and we now have Community edition and Enterprise edition as a result. Now the Community edition releases are more often (every month) and github code repository provides pull requests so community users can actively work on the core too. It certainly is a big step forward but I would like to see more community extensions (mature enough) to be bundled into community version. This would encourage community members to provide even better extensions.
- An important topic last year was using Solr as a content storage. This would enable using far more objects (10 millions and more) in eZ storage than we can today. But, unfortunately, this topic got lost from Berlin to London. Maybe it will revive in some other way in 2012 :). Recently I met some people behind PHPCR which should be considered in that respect.
- Long anticipated and announced last year was the REST API. Good news is that we have progress there, though only in read mode. Hopefully full read/write will be supported by the next conference.
- New topic was mobile, which is no surprise due to huge increase of mobile usage in last 12 months. The already mentioned REST API is the basis for easier multichannel development and we already have seen some nice implementations of mobile apps delivering content from eZ.
Netgen impact
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There was 5 of us (@vjeran, @ivrdoljak, @emodric, @periklo and @ilukac). That is what I call a strong presence, we could cover both, business and community tracks efficiently :)
- Lot of people approached us and thanked for good work we are doing with our extensions. Thanks to all, we really appreciate it.
- Before the conference we helped eZ Systems with the Conference page by implementing it in eZ Publish CMS in just few days (#48hours)
- We also revamped our site before the conference, implemented new fresh design which should better present Netgen and our work.
- We were nominated in 2 categories for eZ Awards: “Blogger of the year” for my blogging efforts and “Extension of the year” for eZ Tags.
- I had a very short “Flash talk” slot , with only 10 minutes to present an important topic (Social Flavoured eZ Publish). Very optimistic, but not wise, as I didn’t manage to show everything what I wanted. The punchline was that a modern CMS should support WEM (web engagement management) as much as possible. But more on that topic in my blog post on the community site.
- We discussed with @paulborgermans about working together on semantic features which includes some new stuff in eZ Tags too. Stay tuned.
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Sweets left for the end: I won the “Blogger of the year” award ;)
A reminder
Vote for the next years conference venue here!
See you next year.