We really did intend to do some live blogging from the event, but honestly we were just too busy! Two days with 250 attendees each, that’s a lot of interesting people to meet. Everybody was asking us about SITEman and Nooku, and I don’t think I ever talked that much in 48 hours in my entire life. Luckily I brought my laptop so I could demo Nooku (as they say, a picture says more than a thousand words). Some people had already discovered nooku.org, which only has a small splash page at the moment, so naturally they wanted to know what it is we’re so excited about.
There were too many interesting presentations, so picking the ones to attend was very hard. I particularly liked James Vasile‘s talk about the GPL, how it is becoming a business necessity to embrace open source, if you want to be able to compete. It sounded maybe a tad too optimistic to my ears, but then again he’s much better situated to know about the future of open source, than us mere mortals.
I also attended a session on TYPO3. I was hoping to learn some more about the new framework they’re developing, called FLOW3, but the talk was more a sort of basic introduction. The back-end looked pretty crowded, complex and unfriendly to me, but it has some impressive features: you can remove each single element from the back-end, to create a very focused UI for each user group. Eg authors would only see features relevant to writing articles, etc. The built-in multi-site feature is also very powerful: you can share parts of the contents of one site with other sites. Definitely worth looking into for a future Joomla! version.
I could spend all evening blogging about the event… well, you just had to be there. If you did attend and like me, you felt that some of the sessions were too short to cover everything (like Johan’s talk about the application layer in J!1.5), meet us at one of the upcoming BootCamps. While chatting with some of our fellow Belgians at the event, there was also some mention of organizing our own Joomla! event in Belgium. Any thoughts on that?
