I was invited to speak at the T3DD15, the TYPO3 Developer Days 2015, on the topic of community collaboration. Indeed my presence there was also made happen because there was a big interest both from the TYPO3 CMS as well as from Neos CMS to explore adopting Symfony. Another topic was adopting of PHPCR, again both TYPO3 and Neos CMS expressed an interest in this topic, though not as urgently as adopting Symfony. In fact the Symfony adoption is already under way with TYPO3 CMS developers having already integrated the Console component and looking towards the Routing component next. Neos CMS has long ago adopted the Yaml component and are looking towards the Process component next. Indeed especially Neos CMS might be beginning to adopt quite a few more Symfony, and other components. They are even willing to explore going to Symfony full stack, though it would need to be made compatible with their unique Proxy based AOP solution that enables them to effectively overload the ā€œnewā€ operator.

Anyway, back to the title of this blog post. I did in fact choose the same title for my talk in which I tried to give some considerations about legal but more importantly community topics related to working with third party projects. I tried to make it clear that there valid points for choosing to not adopt third party solutions in every case. I also tried to address a bit how to get people from other communities more involved into the TYPO3 and Neos CMS communities. Overall I must say I am still not quite as fluent with soft topic talks compared to hard topic, ie. code related, talks. I still do not know how much content to put on the slides and how much I can free style. I also still have a hard time estimating how long my talk will last. I guess I will get better with practice.

It was also an interesting timeĀ to give this talk, as TYPO3 and Neos CMS only recently decided to part ways. It is not clear if this will be the last joint conference. During my talk I wanted to make things a bit more concrete, especially when discussing points about what might prevent people from collaborating with TYPO3 and Neos CMS. It felt a bit strange as I was mentioningĀ issues with each of the projects. I was worried that I might set of a flamewar, but everything seemed to stay quite civil :)

At any rate, I spend two great days with lots of interesting discussions. The location was awesome, essentially right in the NĆ¼rnburg castle, with lots of rooms for people to gather to discuss and hack. Aside from the Symfony and PHPCR related discussions I also entered into a session on diversity as well as on CQRS. Overall it was a very productive environment and a fun exchange with lots of old and new faces!