eZ Publish Summer Camp - opportunity for eZ and Symfony community to meet

The transition from eZ 4 to eZ 5 will not be easy and will take some time. There are several important reasons in my opinion:

• basically eZ 5 is a complete overwrite of the whole code. Once the new stack is implemented fully it will not use any old code. For all experts who were visiting the kernel code daily (like we are doing still) this is a big game changer
• it is not just an overwrite, it uses a completely new PHP framework (Symfony). So the architecture is new, in some parts similar to the old one, in some parts completely new. E.g. the new template engine Twig, looks similar to the old one at first, but the concept behind is to have less complex templates and to do the logic in PHP
• there are no big incentives to switch at first. Only with 5.1 there are more benefits of using finished parts of the new stack: like performance benefits with persistence cache, etc.
• there is not so many opportunities to learn the new stack. There are some online resources and you could schedule a training with eZ Systems, but those are not enough IMO

With the Summer Camp we are tackling this problem as much as we possibly can, being an eZ business partner. Our main goal is to support the eZ community in these transition times with the opportunity to attend great workshops and meet people which already have the experience with eZ 5 or are behind the development of the new stack. More than 90% of workshops are dedicated to the new stuff.

Differences from last year

There is plenty information about the format and experience from last years event on the event web site and in 2 posts at this blog (behind the scenes part 1 and part 2). So lets focus on the difference we made this year.

Only one big difference is the Symfony full track. The reasoning behind this decision is very simple. As the new eZ 5 stack is based on Symfony framework, further more, the eZ 5 is basically a Symfony application. It means that current Symfony developers could learn the new eZ 5 much easier than the current eZ developers. Although not good news for eZ developers, it is good from a broader perspective as Symfony community is bigger - the pool of potential developers is much bigger now. So our incentive with the Symfony track is to mix two communities. Introduce eZ Publish as a powerful CMS to the Symfony community, give the eZ Community chance to learn Symfony as a new base for eZ.

One more significant change is that we don't have the official eZ certification included. Due to the same transition period circumstances certification is also difficult to organize. 

So regarding the learn part of the experience those are the main changes, every thing else will be more or less the same or better than previous year. Regarding the fun part of the experience there are some changes but this is another story :)

Join us once more!