As a newcomer to the Neos scene, it was particularly exciting for me to attend NeosCon, which took place in Hamburg for the second time in 2018.
My first contact with the Neos community was the warm-up event at the Bricks Tea Lounge and Barwhere the NeosCon organization team from sitegeisthad reserved tables. As soon as I entered the bar, I noticed the atmosphere among the attendees: People were meeting here in a relaxed atmosphere, looking forward to spending the next few days together, talking about Neos and moving a vibrant project forward. As a newcomer, I was greeted and welcomed just as warmly as the participants I already knew.
On Friday morning, we made our way to this year's venue, the panorama deck of Nord-Event on the 23rd floor of the Scandic Emporio. We were greeted by Sven Ditz, Managing Director of sitegeist and moderator of the conference, who confidently said: "This location shows where Neos has come to be, right at the top."
To be honest, this statement seemed a little provocative to me at first. But the hours and days that followed showed me what the goal of the Neos community is: to offer the best that a content management system can do without standing out and looking down on other projects. The self-confident welcome was intended as motivation to drive this spirit forward.
No more vi and Emacs?
At the talk The perfect Neos project setup, Karsten Dambekalns opened an open door for me. For all his love of vi and Emacs , he argued in favor of using a fully equipped IDE instead of simple text editors when developing - because IDEs help to get an overview of more complex projects such as Neos and the Flow framework and to keep this overview :) Tools such as code completion and code inspection are further arguments in favor of IDEs.
He also vehemently advocated the use of source code management systems such as git and automated testing. Of course, he also conceded that these techniques have been around for quite a long time. But as long as there are still developers who copy file trees for version management, he believes that we should not tire of pointing this out again and again.
Gold Award for Punkt.de
In a case study, my punkt.de colleague Daniel Lienert presented a project that his team implemented with him as Scrum Master for Verlag Versicherungswirtschaft (VVW): the digitization of texts as part of a new publishing strategy. The texts are read into Neos in DITA source format using an import plugin developed in-house and are then available in Neos as articles - as if they had been entered there directly. They can then be further edited and formatted in Neos if necessary. The articles can now be exported in various output formats such as website articles, e-books, magazine articles and book templates.
The website articles are placed directly on the publisher's website, while the e-books can be integrated into the store and offered for sale. If the texts are to be printed as magazine articles or books, they can be exported directly to Adobe InDesign for final typesetting. The existing formatting is of course taken into account. The fact that around 400,000 Neos nodes are already being managed with the aim of increasing this number to up to 2,000,000 Neos nodes was met with applause. Neos nodes are text body parts such as headings, paragraphs and graphics.
At the end of the conference day, a total of six Neos Awards were presented - bronze, silver and gold as well as three additional "Excellence Awards". The jury consisted of Andreas Förthner, Aske Ertmann and Gerhard Boden, who were selected due to their lively and long-standing activity in the Neos community.
We are happy and proud to have received the Neos Gold Award for the VVW project!
Other winning projects:
Excellence Awards
- Sitegeist Monocle - A Neos module that offers the possibility to display style guides for editors in the backend
- HSSO by ttree - A database project of the Swiss Society for Economic and Social History in collaboration with the Universities of Zurich, Geneva and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, which prepares historical statistics for Switzerland and makes them searchable.
- Nemetschek's intranet implementation, which was realized by the FormatD agency.
Bronze: The Neos Award in the bronze category went to a team from Sitegeist, which implemented the website for Canusa Touristik, a tourism agency specializing in Canada and the United States of America.
Silver: The Neos Award in the Silver category went to wysiwyg* for Canyon Bicycles, a website with an online store for a bicycle manufacturer.
"Dance agile, drink lean"
Afterwards, Sven Ditz invited us to a social event with the slogan "Dance agile, drink lean" at Hamburg's Nochtwache club. In addition to very good instances of the standard cocktails and long drinks, there were also some of our own creations that were really impressive and tasty. This was an opportunity to get to know participants from other companies in a relaxed atmosphere or to catch up with old acquaintances and have a good time together. Here, too, I noticed the strong sense of community in the Neos community, which made me feel as if I had always belonged to this community, even though this was pretty much my first point of contact with it.
Hosting multiple websites in one Neos instance
One Neos - Many Websites by my punkt.de colleague Sebastian Helzle was the first talk on the second day of the conference. He presented how it is possible to host multiple websites in a single Neos instance. This not only saves time and effort for the editors, as they only have to log in to one place, but it is also very easy to cross-reference between the pages of the different websites. In addition, the different websites can access the same basis of plugins and media, which makes it possible to keep the media in a central location - the content repository. This option is extremely interesting for me, because up to now I have only come into contact with content management systems that could only manage one website per instance and therefore required one user access per website. Especially for agencies that create and host many small websites for smaller clients, this approach can be a great simplification. Thanks to Neos' rights management, it is still possible for editors to only have access to the areas they are responsible for.
Integration of stock photo services in Neos
Another talk that interested me was Everything about Assets by Neos founder and one of the managing directors of Flow Native: Robert Lemke. He talked about how they created the possibility to connect the content repository with storage and media services in Neos. This integration interface can be used to store images and other media in storage services such as Google Cloud or Amazon's AWS and link the media in Neos. In addition, there will be implementations of the interface that offer connections to stock photo services such as Shutterstock so that editors can search the offers of such services directly from Neos and acquire the media immediately without first having to make a detour via the corresponding portals and insert the data into the content repository by hand.
Robert showed us live how this works: He took a photo of the listeners with his smartphone and then uploaded it to a specific folder on Google. And voilà - it automatically appeared in his Neos instance. That was really impressive, especially because I can well imagine that the integration of stock photo services can be a huge relief for editors.
videos of the NeosCon 2018
All talks of the conference were streamed live on the internet. The recordings of the talks are available in a YouTube playlist and can therefore be watched at any time. The entire conference technology was provided by Sandstorm-Media and, based on my own experience in event technology, I would like to praise the professionalism with which this was handled.
The second day of the conference ended in the late afternoon. Even though the three days were very exhausting, I have to say that I had a lot of fun and felt very comfortable and accepted as a newcomer. I'm already looking forward to NeosCon 2019, when the conference will leave Hamburg and move on to Dresden, where it will be held at the Alter Schlachthof.
