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OpenCms Days 2008 In ReviewTwo well-spent days with OpenCms users from around the world.
Author: M Butcher  What would make me take such an overwhelmingly positive view of the conference? The OpenCms community is at a crossroads -- perhaps of the make-or-break variety. As an enterprise-class content management system, it enjoys adoption by some big-name companies. But as an Open Source project, it has struggled to strike a balance between the commercial interests of its enterprise-centered user base and the grassroots ideal that supposedly drives Open Source philosophy and productivity. With the emergence of awareness of this problem -- and real attempts to solve it, the conference took on an air of productive urgency that is envigorating. Additionally, the quality of presentations was (in my opinion) abnormally high. And the social atmosphere and after-hours get togethers made for a comfortable and fun environment. The Crisis and the KeynoteTo this point, Alkacon has been the driving force behind OpenCms development. This high degree of commercial support has brought OpenCms to a mature state very rapidly. But development of modules and extensions has not been as active as Alkacon (or the rest of the community) has hoped.Alexander Kandzior, CEO of Alakcon, unabashedly brought this issue into the spotlight in his opening keynote address. And he took the initial steps to (I hope) relieve the tension by doing four things:
But more importantly, I think building a centeral community for OpenCms developers and users is the most needed step. From here, hopes are high that the community site will become a hub of information about available modules (Open Source and commercial alike) and future development -- and will continue to be an excellent source of information for OpenCms users. During the closing session of the conference, the panel and the audience alike spoke enthusiastically (and occasionally heatedly) about what the next steps for fostering the community might be. No consensus was reached, but one could hardly expect that it would be. The outcome was nontheless important, though. It indicated that we -- collectively -- are indeed interested in jumpstarting the community. The SessionsThe conference was divided into two tracks -- a business track and a technical track. It will hardly come as a surprise to hear that I attended the technical track. While I heard many good things about various business track sessions, I didn't attend any of those presentations.Sessions in the were meaty, and I learned a lot from the various presentations. On the first day, Arash Kaffmanesh kicked off the conference, followed by Alexander's keynote. In the technical track, I followed Alexander with my presentation on jQuery. Michael Moossen of Alkacon then presented on OpenCms's Content Relationship Engine, explaining the evolution of strong and weak links in OpenCms. His presentation unraveled many of the mysteries that appeared along with the strong and weak linking concepts. Konrad Wulf urged OpenCms developers to push the envelope on direct editing capabilities. Showing some advanced editing modules, he gave a compelling argument for what the future of CMS systems will be like. Claus Priisholm presented on Lucene and OpenCms -- a topic that I am keenly interested in. It's been nice to see the developments around Lucene-based search. At the end of the first day, we all enjoyed the conference dinner. Day two was equally as eventful. Olli Aro, who has done technical reviewing on all three OpenCms books on the market, gave an informative talk about the challenges of hosting multiple sites on a single instance of OpenCms. Drawing from his own experience, he had a wealth of practical advice. Feliz Noz tackled a problem most notorious among OpenCms developers: How do you build a development environment that plays nicely with OpenCms's Virtual File System (VFS). Felix's solution: use Maven to create a sophisticated build system. Incidentally, his presentation later became the topic of many discussions. It seems that there are many different build methodologies employed in the community, and the topic is a matter of lively debate. Felix's topic obviously addressed a concern in the community. Pavel Slavicek presented on implementing single sign-on for OpenCms -- another topic that I am very interested in. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend his session. Those who did tell me it was very good. Fortunately, since Alkacon is going to make all of the presentations available on the OpenCms site, I will get another chance to see what Pavel has to say. Dan Liliedahl followed Pavel with a presentation derived from his new book. In his session, he walked through the creation of new widgets for use in content editors. The presentation was interesting, and is also reflective of the high-quality content that you will find in his book. Sebastian Himberger rounded up the technical track by discussing the creation of custom resource loaders. He showed how to add PHP and Groovy support to OpenCms, walking through the surprisingly brief code. The topic necessarily involves diving into some of the dark corners of OpenCms, and Sebastian did an excellent job of explaining OpenCms internals. To close off the conference, Arash returned to the platform and moderated a panel discussion. As I mentioned before, the lively conversation that ensued indicated that Alexander's keynote was right on the money: growing the community must be priority one if OpenCms is to continue its growth. (If you attened the business track and want to send me some summaries, please do. I will try to post them here.) And On a Personal Note...I've been part of the community for about five years, now. Through writing a couple of books, I've gotten to know quite a few people in the community. But this first OpenCms conference made one thing clear: Nothing beats meeting others face to face. Ad hoc dinners happened every night I was there, and I had a fantastic time getting to know people in the OpenCms community.There were a couple of people that I'd really hoped to meet who, for one reason or another, could not come. But there are many more that I've now meet in person, and my respect for the abilities of (and prospects for) the community has deepened considerably as a result. |
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