The Neos Conference 2017 in Hamburg was the first of its kind. Although the Inspiring conferences held in Kolbermoor, Bavaria, in recent years had primarily focused on Neos and Flow, this was the first conference with “Neos” in its name where all the presentations centered on the modern CMS.
Two days filled with exciting presentations and showcases
Over the course of two days, more than 20 presentations offered plenty of new insights into the Neos universe. Highlights certainly included Sebastian Kurfürst’s presentation on the complete rewrite of the Neos Backend interface in React, as well as insights into the future development of the content repository using Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS), Event Sourcing, and highly efficient, graph-based data storage.
The keynote presentations offered a chance to think outside the box. Among other things, Mathias Verraes demonstrated how the concepts of event sourcing can make it easier to model customer business processes. Jordi Boggiano, maintainer of key components in the PHP world—Composer and Packagist—provided fascinating insights into the ups and downs of life as a maintainer of large open-source projects.
We at punkt.de were not only a Premium Sponsor at this conference, but were also represented by eight employees and actively contributed to the event with our talks.
At our booth, Jörg Schweizer and Fabian Stein introduced attendees to ourproServer, which offers a hosting environment designed and configured specifically for Flow and Neos projects, among others.
SEO, Search, and Live Streaming
Sebastian Helzle and I were on stage giving presentations as part of the Neos Core Team.
Sebastian spoke about the possibilities Neos offers in the area of search engine optimization. In addition to many practical tips, the informative presentation also showed that SEO measures not only improve discoverability on Google and other search engines but also provide practical benefits for website visitors.
With Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), for example, pages simply load faster even with lower bandwidth; metadata stored as JSON according to Schema.org not only helps search engines but can also be used directly via JavaScript as a data source for front-end applications.
A second presentation I gave together with Sebastian focused on internal search: "Search as Main Navigation" was the title. In 45 minutes, we demonstrated how Neos can be used to implement a search feature that guides visitors directly to the page they want using concepts such as autocompletion, suggestions, facets, and node-type-based rendering. This makes hierarchical navigation a secondary consideration.
For the first time, the entire conference was streamed live on YouTube, allowing people to enjoy the presentations without having to be there in person. The individual talks are available for viewing on the Neos YouTube channel.
However, anyone who wasn’t there missed out on the fantastic social event on Friday evening. In a club that had been completely rented out right in the middle of the Reeperbahn, the DJ mixed quotes from the day’s presentations into danceable beats.
Overall, the first Neos Conference was a fantastic event, and the next one is already scheduled. 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 tickets at the super early-bird price.
