A few words about the Contao conference 2012

Sergey's asked me on twitter to write a few words about the Contao conference 2012 in Germany, so here they are :)

This year I was occupied giving my own speech about development for Contao (the slides of which are by the way available and I did think of you all and all the slides are commented in English :)) and somehow the 4 days just passed by fast as the wind.
So I apologize for not having had time to tweet about the conference a little bit. I know that you're all very curious about things that happen and I do ADMIRE you for your patience! I see a few of you are already learning German somehow because information is often available in German only.

Although I'm not part of the Contao team, I know that this issue is taken seriously. But the team wants to focus on the German speaking market (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) first and then expand to the other countries.
Also try to understand that we have a lot of very active community members who do not speak any English at all. They love Contao for its German focus and we certainly don't want to miss them.
So keep being patient - I guess one day we'll make it :-)

Okay, so let's get to the conference :)
My personal trip started on Wednesday when a big part of the Swiss community (guess we were 14) met in Zurich and drove to Frankfurt in a bus we rented.
We went a day before the conference and left a day later - we like to take it easy ;)

On Wednesday evening, the general assembly of the "Contao Verein Schweiz" (Contao associaton Switzerland) was held and as a few of you might have noticed, there's an official "Contao Association" now :)
The Swiss association, was founded by Andreas Schempp, Gregory Blaser and my humble self back in August 2010 to support the Contao project (not limited to Contao itself -> extensions, merchandising etc.) financially.
We were then asked by the official Contao team whether we could imagine to turn our association into the official one as the legal situation for associations is way more suitable for our purpose in Switzerland than in Germany.
If you look around you might realize that there are actually a lot more associations domicilized in Switzerland (e.g. Typo3 association).
Obviously we assured our support and so we now have an official association domicilized in Switzerland :)

Now comes the crux of the matter: Again, it's in German only for now. We plan to translate everything into English and make the association open to everybody but that's something completely different from translating manuals and such. We have a lot of legal texts (constitution, minutes etc.) that need to be translated professionally which is certainly not anything an ordinary person like me can translate :) And professional translations are expensive :roll:

Anyway. Those of you that are interested in the association and don't mind using Google translate can get more information on http://association.contao.org.

I promise we'll get it translated!

So this is the first news about the conference: There's an official Contao association now :)

As usual, Leo Feyer started off the conference with his keynote about the Contao version in the making ;) This time it was about Contao 3.
Check out the keynote to get more information: http://www.contao-konferenz.de/tl_fi...12/Keynote.pdf
It introduces the new features of Contao 3. A quick summary:

• Reorganized directory structure[/*:m:15nzvynl]
• jQuery as alternative front end JS framework[/*:m:15nzvynl]
• HTML5 videoplayer[/*:m:15nzvynl]
• Better support for mobile websites[/*:m:15nzvynl]
• Implementation of a DAFS (database aided file system) which is NOT a virtual file system[/*:m:15nzvynl]
• Easier image meta data handling (no meta.txt anymore)[/*:m:15nzvynl]

The beta1 has been published. I guess what might be interesting for you is that Leo expects the final version to be released in September 2012.

Then we had a workshop about the extension development for Contao 3 for which I can only mention the main points. As the developers amongst the readers of this post know, documentation is rare and you'll end up reading the source anyway :D

• PHP 5.3 is a requirement so yes, we can finally use its features![/*:m:15nzvynl]
• Contao 3 uses namespaces but NOT the way they were designed to be used! We can't use namespaces the PSR-0 standard way because Contao 3 was all about backward compatibility. Actually there's a new class loader that...
  
  [list:15nzvynl]
• ...allows you to organize your classes in your modules as you like (don't have to be in the root anymore)[/*:m:15nzvynl]
• ...let's you override any class that is registered in the namespace "Contao" using class_alias()[/*:m:15nzvynl]

[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]Cleaner debugging bar[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]A lot more of static methods[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]Models for the front end[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]New API documentation: http://api3.contao.org[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]No meta.txt anymore[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]No database.sql anymore[/*:m:15nzvynl][*]The "development" module is now called "devtools" and became part of the core again (because it needs adjustments for every Contao version anyway) and it provides a Contao 2 to Contao 3 extension updating routine that automatically writes files to register your classes in the new class loader.[/*:m:15nzvynl][/list:u:15nzvynl]

Basically it's really all about "you can use it but you don't have to". So you should be able to run the devtools Contao 3 extension updating routine and your module should more or less work.

Yeah, and that's basically what I think might be most interesting for you and I hope you got an insight once again :)

Feel free to ask if I should have left out a key point (about the conference. Please do post questions related to Contao 3 or anything else in a separate thread) :)

PS: Like for every of my...let's call them "summary posts": No guarantee for what I said. I'm not part of the Contao team and everything that is official can be found on contao.org :)

The keynote from Leo is also available in English:
--> http://www.contao.org/en/news/contao-3_0_beta1.html

Regards,
Alex

Great! Thank you Tolfar for your prompt response.

I'm used to the fact that information is only available in German. But to read and especially to understand it with Google Translate is very hard :(

I have some questions:

1. It's interesting, does the Contao community grows up (during 2011-2012)? ...German speaking community and English speaking. What do you think about this? Are there new faces on Conference?

2. It's great that Contao 3 will be released this year in September (as far as I remember previously it was told that Contao 3 will be released in summer 2013). But what about 2.11.x branch?

Hey thanks heaps Toflar :D
Your efforts are really appeciated.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DyaGa

1. It's interesting, does the Contao community grows up (during 2011-2012)? ...German speaking community and English speaking. What do you think about this? Are there new faces on Conference?

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Hmm...I think it still grows and I saw a lot of new faces, yes :) But we didn't have more participants at the conference than last year. I think there's a limit for every conference - regardless of its popularity. Personally, I think we still have a great share of the community that uses Contao in spare time and just for fun. Those people often don't come to the conference because of financial reasons.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DyaGa

2. It's great that Contao 3 will be released this year in September (as far as I remember previously it was told that Contao 3 will be released in summer 2013). But what about 2.11.x branch?

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Contao 3 is not a rewrite. It's the same framework etc.
There won't be any 2.* version anymore. Contao 3 will be the successor of Contao 2.11 :)
The rewrite is usually referred to as "Contao Reloaded" :)

Great job, dear Toflar!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Toflar

Contao 3 is not a rewrite. It's the same framework etc.
There won't be any 2.* version anymore. Contao 3 will be the successor of Contao 2.11 :)
The rewrite is usually referred to as "Contao Reloaded" :)

---

Please remember Contao 2.11 is first LTS release. So I think that releases teeny version updated, such as 2.11.4 would continue to be released. (But not 2.12?)

Best regards.

Exactly :) It's an LTS but there won't be any 2.12 :)