Neos Conference 2022
On 29 and 30 April, the Neos Conference took place again, for which we are the organizer. We were there with twelve sitegeistemployees, two sitegeistemployees were also represented on stage with a talk and in the end we were even able to take home the Neos Dedication Award.
Our Frontend colleagues, who have not been active in the Neos universe for so long, arrived the day before to take part in the workshop "Neos from Zero to Hero", which Sebastian Helzle kindly organized again this year. Here, the colleagues gained a good insight into the basic concepts of Neos and how such a project is structured by default. This helps with day-to-day work and creates an awareness of how the Neos setup at sitegeist has evolved.
This was followed by 2 days of exciting, very high-quality talks on topics relating to the Neos world and beyond. The Neos project is now 17 years old and is about to come of age. With the next Neos version (Neos 9), the community is taking the bold step towards an event-sourced content repository.
The event-sourced content repository is the first of its kind and offers features such as history and rollback functionalities, audit logging, conflict detection during publication and overall far better performance and scalability than the previous system. So you can be excited!
Exciting lectures
sitegeist was also represented in the presentations at the Neos Conference 2022. Two of this year's presentations were given by sitegeistand Neos Core Team members Martin Ficzel and Bernhard Schmitt.
Martin presented the topic "Responsive images and how to implement them" on the first day of the event on the main stage, supported by many cat pictures.
Due to the use of different end devices with different screen sizes and orientations and additional challenges such as limited data transfer rates, the responsive display of images is more important than ever and should be considered in the development of every CMS project.
However, the technically correct implementation of responsive images is not trivial and unfortunately very error-prone. For this reason, sitegeist has created the Sitegeist.Kaleidoscope package, a tool to simplify this process for developers in NEOS.
You can also find the complete presentation on YouTube.
On the second day of the event, Bernhard led through the topic "Component APIs and how to enforce them" on the Studio Stage.
In their day-to-day work with Fusion components and their API specifications, developers face various problems regarding stability and testability: Have I provided all the necessary information? What information needs to be transmitted at all? Which data types are allowed? Have I made a typo somewhere?
At the latest when, after hours of debugging, it becomes apparent that a misspelled width or height somewhere else on the page was the cause of the bug hours later, you want clear feedback from the system. With this in mind, Bernhard presented an approach using PresentationObjects, which we have already used successfully in several projects.
For more information or if you want to know what this has to do with elephants, you can also find this presentation on YouTube.
Neos CMS Awards 2022
At the end of the first day of this Neos Conference, the best Neos projects of the year were once again selected by a jury of five experts with the presentation of the Neos Awards. As in previous years, the number and quality of submissions continued to rise.
This year, particular emphasis was placed on collaborations between Neos agencies. The joint collaboration of different companies on major projects has long been one of the hallmarks of the Neos community and this year's award appropriately recognized and celebrated this.
The cherry on the cake was of course the Dedication Award for our package Sitegeist.LostInTranslation (DeepL Integration in Neos), which we won together with CodeQ from Austria.
Many thanks to all the helpers!
We are delighted that the Neos Conference 2022 was able to take place in person again despite all the challenges and would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people who made this Neos Conference possible: the co-organizers sandstorm, the moderators, speakers, sponsors and all the other helpers. And especially, of course, to our Lisa, who once again put on a fantastic, high-quality event.
... and what happens next?
After the 2-day conference in Dresden, 25 participants did not go home, but continued the following week with a Neos sprint. Bernhard and Martin from sitegeistalso took part.
In the Neos sprint, the Neos community comes together to work on current topics for a week. The focus of this sprint was everything to do with Neos 9 and the new Content Repository, but other exciting topics were also developed further. For example, three new features were developed for the Sitegeist.Archaeopteryx package and two new sitegeist packages were created: Sitegeist.Turncoat and Sitegeist.Rollup.
And the date and location for the next Meetup has also been found: sitegeist is inviting the Neos community to the Neos Sprint in Hamburg in autumn as a sponsor and organizer!
