The Neos Conference 2017 in Hamburg was the first of its kind. Although the Inspiring Conferences in Kolbermoor, Bavaria, have mainly focused on Neos and Flow in recent years, this was the first conference with Neos in the name, where all the presentations revolved around the modern CMS.
Two days full of exciting presentations and showcases
Over the course of two days, there was plenty of news from the Neos universe in more than 20 presentations. Highlights were certainly the presentation of the complete rewrite of the Neos backend interface in React by Sebastian Kurfürst and the insights into the future development of the content repository with Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), EventSourcing and highly efficient, graph-based data storage.
The keynote speeches allowed participants to think outside the box. Mathias Verraes showed, among other things, how the concepts of event sourcing can be used to model customer business processes more easily. Jordi Boggiano, maintainer of the important components of the PHP world - Composer and Packagist - gave exciting insights into the ups and downs in the life of a maintainer of large open source projects.
As punkt.de, we were not only present at this conference as a premium sponsor, but were also represented by eight employees and played an active role in shaping the event with talks.
Jörg Schweizer and Fabian Stein presented our proServer to the participants at our stand, which offers a hosting environment designed and configured for Flow and Neos projects, among others.
SEO, search and live broadcast
Sebastian Helzle and I were part of the Neos Core Team and gave presentations on stage.
Sebastian spoke about the possibilities that can be realized with Neos in the area of search engine optimization. In addition to many practical tips, the informative presentation also showed that the SEO measures not only serve to improve findability in Google and Co. but also have a practical benefit for visitors to the website.
With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), for example, pages simply load faster with less bandwidth, meta data stored as JSON according to Schema.org not only helps search engines but can also be used directly as a data source for front-end applications via JavaScript.
A second presentation, which I gave together with Sebastian, was about the internal search: "Search as main navigation" was the title. In 45 minutes we showed how a search can be realized with Neos that can lead the visitor directly to the desired page with concepts such as autocompletion, suggestion, facets and NodeType-Based-Rendering. Hierarchical navigation thus becomes a minor matter.
For the first time, the entire conference was streamed live on YouTube, so that you could enjoy the talks without being there in person. You can watch the individual talks on the Neos YouTube Channel.
However, those who were not there missed the great social event on Friday evening. In a fully rented club in the middle of the Reeperbahn, the DJ mixed quotes from the day's talks to danceable beats.
Overall, the first Neos Conference was a great event and the next date has already been set. The Neos Conference 2018 will take place from April 13 to April 14, 2018 at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and you can already secure your tickets at the Super-Early-Bird price.
