In Netmaking where I work, we work with an Open Source CMS/framework named eZ Publish which has community and business partners in many parts of the world. Every year these partners gather on eZ Summer Conferance to learn new things about the framework, meet each other and to see who gets the glorious eZ Awards. This year it all happened in Berlin.

The event span 3 days with a partner gathering the first day, and then 2 days with different speaks divided on 3 tracks: Community & Developer track, Web Content Management track and Digital Media track.

Going down there on the wednesday I attended two days of tracks, the eZ Awards and the Developer Certification for the 4.3 version.

Day 1 – thursday 24th of june

The days started with the keynote “Open Source business models” by Richard Seibt, Open Source Business Foundation. He spoke of the different type of models used in open source, and the general trend that they move to a “mixed approach” with an optional payed premium version including support targeting the business marked.

My next track was “The Future of Newspapers” by Martha L. Stone, WAN ASSO. It was not that interesting. Then I spent some time in the hall talking to Stig from Grenland Date before I entered “Concept and strategy for digital magazines” by Staffan Ekholm, Bonnier. He gave us an walk trough of Bonniers visions for the feature, among other things showing clips from the video they published last year Bonnier Mag+ Prototype and talking about how they first releases of Popular Science in Apple’s Appstore He said that they have had about 30.000 sales. There was also a question about their process publishing new editions and he told they used a setup with InDesign and some automatization releasing it as an “In app” purchase.

After lunch I went to “Solutions on top of eZ Publish for the Media sector” by Yngve Tvedt, NXC. Didn’t make it to the start, but it was about some drag n drop things build on the top of the eZ Flow extension They will publish these on labs.nxc.no

Next up was “Search Engine Optimization” by Petri Mertanen, Naviatech. Most general SEO stuff, but I picked up using Google Alerts on your keywords and the extension xrowmetadata

“3 use cases for eZ Find” by Ivo Lukac, Netgen. Lot about eZ Find. Using it for content fetching, instead of the build in api in eZ publish since it is faster.

Later that evening the eZ Awards was held in a place close to Brandenbruger Tor. It was a great show with Marvin and a youngish band playing between the prizes.

Day 2 – friday 25th of june

On this day I first was attending “Utilizing Enterprise Search on Media portals” by a food and twitter friend of mine named Felix Laate It was mostly about how dinmat.no are planning to “a google” by letting products buy keywords when users search for recipies or ingridients. It was good but short and think many of us would like to have some more information about the underlying stuff.

Next was “The eZ Publish API, ideas, open discussion” by Ole Marius Smestad, eZ Systems. eZ Publish lets your build a your custom semantic data model, and with the grow of api and open web, its time to let us plug into this and aggregate it on other plattforms and sites. Currently it looks like this will be done through an php-api where a developer can open up all or parts of the content in a restfull way with json or other formats.

Last talk before lunch was “Digital Media Expert Panel”, where among other Felix and Bertrand was having an Q and A session.

After lunch was a keynote “Content Management and the Financial Times” by Charl Porter, Financial Times. Financial Times has for several years had a paid content model and the talk was about how this worked for them and future thoughts on what they are planning with the information plattforms like iPad.

The conference ended with “Developer Certification” for eZ Publish 4.3 where I passed with a good margin!