Marco Steinhäuser

The 2012 season for OXID developer meet-ups started in Hamburg on January 13. Sigmar Kress from Rhinos Media organized the location and we set up a page on OXIDforge for gathering information about participants and ideas for talks.

Although we announced the event relatively late, more than twenty people came to the meet-up. I was glad to see partners and shop owners sending their developers and project leaders to the event.

As previously announced, Joscha started talking about his TOXID project and how it can be used to integrate Typo3 content with OXID eShop (and vice-versa). We also discussed integration with other content management systems like WordPress and Joomla using TOXID. If you’ve been using TOXID for this purpose, please feel free to share your insights, or write a tutorial about it, on OXIDforge.

Later in the evening, I spent some time talking about OXID’s development plans for 2012, including OXID eShop 4.6.0 beta, and we had an interesting and spirited discussion about this.

Another big topic also came up: the idea of developing another admin panel with the community, which was first born at the OXID Unconference in May 2011. Now, in Hamburg, almost everybody who was interested in this venture was in attendance, and so we agreed on a kick-off meeting and coding event between March 9-10. If you are interested in supporting this project and have some spare capacity, please contact me.

The bottom line: we held a very successful and informative developer meet-up again. If you would like to see a similar meet-up in your location, please talk to me about the date first. The rest is pretty simple: just reserve a table for enough people and help to spread the word.

As earlier announced in my blog post on oxid-esales.com, Friday, March 11th, was our first local developer meet-up in Leipzig, Germany.

I personally was really surprised to see 16 people attending, including developers from our partners D³ Data Development (Thalheim, Saxony), GN2 netwerk (Coburg, Bavaria), marmalade.de (Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt), dotSource GmbH (Jena, Thuringia) and Ontraq Europe (Augsburg, Bavaria). Dirk Senebald (Gera, Thuringia), Gregor Berg (Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia) and Alexander Thomas (Berlin) also took part, together with my personal friends and (former) co-workers Mathias Fiedler (Leipzig/Berlin) and Erik Kort.

Christian Zacharias explains

Joscha Krug proudly shows off his OXID Commons shirt

These guys found something really interesting

Our host, Hannes from Geyserhaus, worked really professionally to ensure that everything was set up for us. The projector and the screen were already installed, together with the tables and power cords. Fortunately, there was no Internet connection; this allowed us all to concentrate on  Christan Zacharias‘ talk about the OXID eShop framework, the OXID eFire platform, how to write extensions, and news for developers in OXID eShop 4.5.0.

The entire talk took about six hours including interposed questions, laid-back discussions and straight comments to OXID’s (Erik’s and mine) point of view. We also had an interesting four-person discussion about the pros and cons of Open Source Software. Through the process, I picked up at least 25 points to be “injected” into OXID’s product management cycle. Thanks for all the comments, mates!

At the end of the day, I think the aims of a meeting like this – namely, getting to know the faces behind forum or mailing list posts, learning about the experiences of others and bringing coders together for collaboration chances – were absolutely fulfilled, and that it was an enjoyable and learning experience for all.

I’m curious now about upcoming meetings in other cities like Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich (in progress), Cologne and Frankfurt. Are any of you keen to take over the organization of such meetings? Drop me a line or post a comment if so!