From our Neos Sprint in Dresden

Neos sprints are always a great opportunity to meet community and team members in person and get new topics kickstarted or make big progress on ongoing topics. Main topics at this sprint were:

• neoscon.io - our new conference website
• Neos React UI bugfixes and features released at the end of the sprint
• editor documentation (coming soon)
• Neos Foundation membership and funding topics

I am a frontend developer at T-Systems Multimedia Solutions and heard of Neos because of the neos-ui which is build in React. Some weeks ago I got a first look at Neos during an UX/UI Meetup in Dresden hosted by Sandstorm. Afterwards I wanted to get to know more about Neos and actually try it out. I heard there was a sprint taking place in Dresden, so I decided to give it a try. 
 
The sprint started off with a daily where we first got to introduce ourselves and then discussed the topics that should be tackled during the sprint. A big part of the sprint was supposed to be the new NeosCon.io website. This was the perfect opportunity for me to get to know Neos. First I setup my development environment. That turned out to be a rather simple endeavour: I just needed to clone the git-repository, install some prerequisites and Neos itself. Afterwards Sebastian took a lot of time to explain to me how Neos and all its parts work together. That got me covered with all the basics and I got assigned to some warm up tasks. I started with some simple CSS-fixes - no big deal, as this is what I do during my day-to-day business ;).

The next task was a bit more advanced, though. Sebastian, Theo (also new to Neos) and me wanted to create an image teaser component, consisting of a background image and some linkable teaser text in front of it.
Quite fortunately there already existed a base NodeType inside the Neos.io website we could re-use for our use case. We had to make some adjustments and Sebastian explained a bit more about the relationship between Fluid-Templates, NodeTypes, Fusion and how it all fits together. With this new gained knowledge it was not too hard for us to make some enhancements to the existing NodeType and its corresponding template and thereby create our new shiny ImageTeaser-Component.

On the second day of the sprint Sebastian prepared the “Speaker”- and the “Talks”-pages for us. These two pages were our focal point of work for the next few days. We had to create our own NodeTypes, created templates and of course styled the generated markup. Apart from a few rather advanced topics (mostly Fusion-related things) we could work on our own and had lots of fun doing so. In the evening of day two there was also a Neos Meetup at the Sandstorm office. Equipped with beverages and pizza we got to see some pretty interesting comparisons between different CMSs, e.g. TYPO3, Wordpress, Pimcore,Contao and of course Neos. Afterwards we got to chat and play some table football as well.

The next few days I continued working on the “Speakers”- and “Talks”-Pages, made some styling fixes and supported Gerhard with the styling for the “Schedule”. At the end of the sprint the NeosCon.io website already looked pretty decent and was almost ready to be launched.

To sum it up: It was a great experience, I met a lot of awesome people and learned a lot. Everyone was very welcoming and I really enjoyed the atmosphere.
I encourage everyone, even with no prior knowledge of Neos, to join a sprint.

As is the case with most of our sprints, we did not only code. We enjoyed two events in the evenings, hung out in Sandstorm's office or explored the surroundings including the city. We encourage hosts and attendees to take the opportunity to get to know each other and the city they are visiting. Since we had attendees from multiple countries there were always interesting discussions.

On Tuesday evening we had the Neos and Flow meetup with a CMS comparison (thanks to Jon for the presentation) and some live coding. The whole group gained interesting insights into TYPO3, Wordpress, Pimcore, Contao and of course Neos. On Thursday we had a BBQ with family, friends and partners of Sandstorm and enjoyed self-made salads, table soccer matches and nice conversations well into the night. It was a great opportunity to get to know the local community and talk to new people.

A special end of this sprint was Sebastian's birthday party on Saturday. Some sprint attendees had the chance to stay and so we got to enjoy another evening with music, BBQ and nice conversation - not just about Neos ;-)

As always, a huge thanks goes to all attendees who make our sprints so much fun, the companies who sponsor travel/accommodation costs and our host Sandstorm!