Blue neon lights, steam from the fog machine, drum & bass meets electric guitar and spotlights flood the rustic, large conference room. The Neos Conference 2023 in Berlin begins.
Right in the opening keynote, big topics like AI, Fake News and the associated change in human-machine interaction are touched on. Robert Lemke, founder of the Neos Foundation, draws the following conclusion in particular from the previous pandemic and the upcoming "AI revolution": personal collaboration and a real community are the keys to success. Sneak peaks at the upcoming talks raise hopes for great innovations, more performance, more community, more Neos. Over 22 program items are waiting to be absorbed by us. We are excited!
Git for Content
The first presentation revolves around a big topic, a big number - Neos 9. This means that we can look forward to a new content repository, which promises a revolution - or at least an evolution - on the oversized presentation screen with the words "Git for Content". In addition to the versioning of the CMS content, this is connected to an improvement in the reference mechanism, which promises, among other things, back-referencing between nodes, more performance and stability and, above all, should make Elastic Search redundant. The best thing is that all these innovations will be rolled out in autumn 2023. Those who already want to update their projects to Neos 9 do not have to fear that everything will go down the drain after the publication of the final version - there will be no breaking changes until the release.
Decisions about decisions
In the following 48 hours, a colourful potpourri of different topics poured over us, always on the fine line between sensory overload and the right amount of coffee. On the one hand, there were plenty of talks about Neos itself and its possibilities, with a good balance of basics and more advanced methods. In addition to these, there were also all kinds of topics that allowed us to look beyond Neos and make connections to other technologies and learnings. The most important steps for an update to Neos 9 were shown with a practical example, Neos concepts were rethought, the use of TailwindCSS was discussed, UX/UI improvements were gently brought to the developers and even lessons were learned from botched rocket missions. Among other things, a hacker pointed out some security gaps in public institutions with fatal consequences, and we witnessed how the use of gRPC can speed up API requests enormously.
However, despite the abundant selection, we couldn't miss anything - all presentations are available for free on Youtube in the Neos Con playlist.
Last but not least
Finally, Christopher Hlubek amazed the audience with his presentation of a headless Neos. He and his team succeeded in separating Neos from its actual Fusion frontend and replacing it with Next JS - even retaining one of the essential core functions of Neos, the inline editability. In addition to the technically impressive solution, he thus demonstrated a major additional factor that clearly speaks in favour of Neos: the possibilities are seemingly limitless.
The last program item of the Neos Conference 2023 then underlined why these possibilities exist at all. The closing of the conference referred in large part to the community, the most important link in the development of the open-source CMS, and appealed once again for contributions, be it in the form of code or donations. For this reason, we as Format D, in addition to our numerous supporting activities in recent years, also spontaneously decided to sponsor the Contribution Day the following day, with a well-deserved lunch.
