eZ Winter Conference 2011 in Nice - Summary

• It seems that differences between the Enterprise and Community edition are slowly becoming more visible. It is still to early to tell how will this influence the community. The two-way track was introduced in Berlin last summer and 4.4 version of eZ Publish was the first version with two versions available. Some partners were suggesting to explain this feature better on ez.no, maybe the solution is just to make the community portal link a bit more visible.
• eZ Market, a place for eZ Partners and eZ Community to make some money by developing and providing cool extensions to the public, should go live soon. Question that remains to be answered is: are these extension, which should be certified by eZ, suppose to be working only on Enterprise Edition? First extension to show up will be eZ Varnish which enables better integration with Varnish reverse proxy. Also, a very good newsletter extension developed by CJW will be available on eZ Market.
• The REST API (part of the new more abstract API), that was announced in Berlin,  is promised to be available in the next eZ version (we hope they mean 4.5), at least implementing read functions. Lots of people, including us at Netgen, are eagerly waiting this feature for few years now. It should significantly boost development for other channels like mobile, tablet etc.
• Also noticeable where a lot of new eZ people on management level (in product management, marketing, etc.), that have a lot of work to take the company and the community to the next level. Those two are closely connected with each other so loosing focus on either one of them could be very risky.
• We would like to congratulate Community manager Nicolas Pastorino for job well done: flash talks, barcamp and interactive sessions with eZ Engineering where very useful and educational. We should have more of this!

As for Netgen’s contribution to the conference, on the first day we presented a new way how to manage taxonomies in eZ Publish. A new datatype, called eZ Tags, does the trick. We encourage all community members to try it out. Source code is available here: http://github.com/ezsystems/eztags
Feedbacks are welcomed here: http://projects.ez.no/eztags
Slides are viewable here: http://goo.gl/dYguq

Additionaly, we had a flash talk presenting Netgen Push extension for pushing content to other channels like Twitter and Facebook. More info on this extension can be found here: http://projects.ez.no/ngpush

Last but not least, weather was perfect, thank you Nice :)