A truly Inspiring Conference

The 2014 edition of the Inspiring Conference has ended. If you didn’t know what the Inspiring Conference is then here is a short description. It’s a conference that was held in Kolbermoor / Germany between the 28th and 29th of March and dedicated especially to TYPO3 Flow and TYPO3 Neos, although other subjects were also on the agenda. It’s the 3rd edition and it’s certainly not the last. For me it’s the first time that i attended this conference but i knew early on that this is just what i was waiting for and now at the end i’m sure that i will come next year too.

The workshop

For me the conference started earlier because i’ve also attended the TYPO3 Flow advanced workshop held by Bastian Waidelich on the 27th of March in Bad Aibling. The workshop was very interesting and I’ve learned some new stuff although i’m not such a beginner anymore with Flow.

First day

The first official day of the conference kickstarted with an amazing laser show with an epic musical background.

Video credits: Mirko Kaufmann

After that it was time for community manager Ben van’t Ende to talk to the audience before Robert Lemke’s keynote and Christian Müller’s talk called Neos 101. Of course the coffee breaks and the dicussions (people still amazed by the laser show) couldn’t be forget. Then it was Sebastian Kurfürst’s task to get the audience acquainted with Typoscript 2.0. Shortly after 12.00 Martin Helmich produced one of the most interesting presentations from my point of view, this was a presentation about running TYPO3 Flow on HipHop VM and some benchmarks compared to running it with Apache in different modes. Conclusion is that Flow can be run on HipHop with some small modifications and this does improve the speed of the application, however it is for now a little bit unstable for production use. Regardless of that i will have to try this myself just for fun!

The Markthalle was the scene of the lunch where all kinds of goodies were served to the people and of course the social interactions continued. The afternoon sessions started with the session How Flow helps us save the world by Tim Numan and Jesper Paardekooper and then again it was time for something really interesting for me and that is Domain Event – the hidden gem of DDD by Henrik Møller Rasmussen.

After another break Karsten Dambekalns shared his experiences with migrating a TYPO3 CMS website’s content to TYPO3 Neos. The conclusion is that it’s not that easy but it’s doable. The last session of the day was by Robert Lemke and it was called Look Ma, no Plugins! and demonstrated how one can create custom content types with TYPO3 Neos without having to create custom extensions/plugins.

The organizers also prepared a flying buffet and a cake for closing of the first day of presentations. However the day was not yet over as the social event was just about to start. Hidden down in the “Kellergewölbe” (dungeon) was a nice place for socializing, dancing and of course drinking german beer. Although i didn’t stay too long i’ve heard that some people went home just before sunrise.

Second day

The second day started by a well known personality in the PHP world – Sebastian Bergmann who talked about the Driven Developer. And if we were at the subject of testing then it was natural that the next presentation by Christopher Hlubek called A practical guide to BDD with Behat and Flow followed after that. This was also a presentation that appealed to me.

After the break another session aimed at the new kid on the block – TYPO3 Neos. This session was held by Dominique Feyer and was about Node Kingdom. A place where every node feels at home. After the lunch there were also some good presentations. Henrik Møller Rasmussen showcased their app called Famly and talked about the inner workings of this project.

Later Marko Klawonn talked about Fakeperformance (loading …) then Christian Jul Jensen confessed the trials and triumphs of Opeepl a Flow 2.0 application built by himself. This was interesting for me also because i always wanted to see real world case studies and showcases of Flow applications. Then it was Sebastian Kurfürst’s presentation Polyglot Neos : Localisaton in Neos 1.2 that closed the second and last day of the Inspiring Conference.

Conclusions

With about 250 participants (event sold out), 3 workshops and two days of presentations it was a very good conference for anyone who works with TYPO3 Neos, TYPO3 Flow and TYPO3 CMS. This event demonstrated that interest for the new members of the TYPO3 family (that is Neos and Flow) is increasing year by year and the products are getting mature enough to be used in real world projects. Regarding the organization i think it was one of the best organized events I participated in and I want to thank to the guys at Techdivision for taking care of the organization but also for the sponsors who made it possible.