Summary of the first Contao Camp in Essen DE

Hi all

As some of you might have heard the first Contao Camp took place in Essen DE over the last weekend.
The purpose of the camp was to get together and work on different topics that arose over the weekend.
We were about 60 people and the following is a little summary of what we ended up with :)

• SEO: there was a group working on a checklist in terms of SEO. They were trying to answer questions like "what can or should I do in terms of SEO?" and especially "How can I achieve this with Contao?". I haven't seen all of what they came up with but as far as I know, the group will publish a checklist and I'm pretty sure that someone can translate this into English so you all can benefit from it too :)[/*:m:26yndhcl]
• Flyer: This group tried hard to identify the target groups of Contao without having any market analysis (but that's what the camp was all about - make the best out of the available means, right?) they could base on. At the end of the second day they had a prototype of a 4-page-flyer with slogans, pictures and all kind of things.[/*:m:26yndhcl]
• VFS: Many of you might have come across this problem: you move files around in the file system and suddenly your whole page is broken because the paths to the files are completely wrong. That's where a Virtual File System (VFS) comes in. We found a pretty awesome way to add another layer between PHP and Contao itself to enable getting files from anywhere (local file system, database, flickr or any other cloud services) and I'm confident that this will result in an extension so that we can finally solve this problem. But still, it's a long way to get there.[/*:m:26yndhcl]
• Music Academy: A fairly large group was working on a new Music Academy theme with the goal to replace the horrible one that is currently deployed with every Contao installation. Not only did they create a new layout but also they added new pages to demonstrate new modules that have made it into the Contao core since version 2.6 (not sure when exactly the demo page was created).[/*:m:26yndhcl]
• Contao Reloaded: Probably the topic the majority of you all and also of us German-speaking developers have been waiting for. Why am I not talking about "Contao 3"? Contao 3 is planned to be released for the official Contao Conference in May 2012. This will not be a complete rewrite of Contao but another improvement over the 2.11 of which we can expect a Release Candidate in December 2011 and the stable in January 2012. Contao Released though will be a completely different content management system with a new framework written from scratch. We collected a lot of ideas such as front end editing, better multilingual support, namespacing etc. The goal is to release this version for the Contao Conference 2014 but from what I have heard, the development will be public (obviously not at the very beginning because we need some kind of foundation to work on). Personally, I think what you can take away of these statements is that the Contao community and Leo as main developer want a new version to have the finger on the pulse of the time and that you can sell Contao solutions to your customers with clear conscience. Ah, and probably Contao will change sides from SVN to GIT and maybe become a github project.[/*:m:26yndhcl]

PLEASE NOTE:
What you have just read is subjective!! It's my personal appraisal of what I have heard and seen over the last few days. Although Leo himself has given us the dates I mentioned above, it's not an official statement and you should NOT rely on this information.
All I want to say is that you should not take this for granted until the official Contao team gives a statement on contao.org :)

Hope to have given you an insight of what we have been working on over the last few days 8-)
All in all it was another "family reunion" with a lot of fun, heart-to-heart talks, new faces and and an incredible amount of passion!

All fantastic points. Very excited to see the VFS layer, and looking forward to some official word on Contao:Reloaded. The thought of a whole new rewritten system is both exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time, so I'd really like to see some official info so that we can plan accordingly. 2014 will be here before you know it! :D

Thanks Yanick, for keeping us informed... Wish I could have been there!

thanks toflar, much appreciated :D

thanks for the insight info!!!

Thanks for this post :)