Looking ahead at MODXpo
According to my countdown, we are currently 11 days away from MODXpo 2013, in the city of Cologne (Köln as the locals call it). There's a lot of work to do, but I'd like to look ahead at the event and share my list of must-sees at the event.
First of all, you probably heard by now that modmore is a Gold Sponsor of MODXpo. This means you'll be hearing a lot from us at the event, we'll have our own stand with a bunch of shiny new modmore merchandise, and of course we're doing our part in supporting events for the MODX Community, as we promised when we launched. Both myself and JP DeVries (who's responsible for Redactor) will be attending, and we should be at our lil' modmore stand during each break, chatting with users or answering your questions about what we do.
Day 1 - Friday
After the mandatory State of MODX by founder Ryan Thrash which no doubt will be filled with inspiration and scoops from the MODX team, the next keynote is probably the one I most look forward to: Fail Compilation - We Goofed So You Don't Have To, by fellow Dutch-man Gauke Pieter Sietzema (Co-founder at Sterc). I know GP personally and am looking forward to what will likely be a hilarious talk, full of information that will make you re-think your last site build. Knowing the graphical skills in GP's team, I'm expecting the slides for this talk to be the prettiest of the entire conference, too. Oh, but no pressure Gauke ;)
After lunch, you should definitely check out my session about Contributing to MODX. I will talk about the different ways everyone (yes, you too!) can contribute to the MODX Open Source project. Various obstacles (such as Git or lacking developer skills) will be torn down and, if I succeed, you will be empowered to make MODX better together.
Don't leave yet though, because right after my session, Garry Nutting (Senior Developer at MODX) will blow us away not only with his heavy Lincolnshire accent, but also with a technical session about Caching & Scaling in Multiserver Environments (no link yet, sorry). While I know some tricks, I look forward to learning about it a lot more from Garry's experience.
At the end of the day, there's time to meet others for in-depth discussions about the meaning of life and MODX and personally I look forward to meeting people with awesome ideas and talking code too.
Day 2 - Saturday
The second day will probably see a slow start because of the evening before, but luckily Anselm Hannemann is there to wake up your brains and to talk about The 5 Things You Need For Responsive Development. Anselm is well known in the W3C community due to his work on responsive images, and happens to know a thing or two about MODX too, so I'm looking forward to hearing all about his work on that and other initiatives. Responsive design is a huge part of the web nowadays, and this session sounds like it will bring us all up to speed on the best practices today.
Again after lunch, I'm back on stage. Sorry about that. This time, I will talk about the Business of Premium. In the session I'll talk about the struggle of making money with open source, while supporting the open source development, and how modmore is an attempt to find the mythical sweet spot between commercial and open source. In this session, I will also show how the tools we develop at modmore can help you build better sites (it's not selling if we're giving away free licenses, right?).
While I wanted to highlight 3 sessions on each day, I've not been able of choosing between Continues Integration & Deployment with MODX (by Chris Cherrett from Adido) and Distros for Success: The 6Ps (by Steve King from Blaze Concepts). CI has been a topic I played with in the past few months when building modmore, and I am very curious to see how Adido (as a team) has been handling that. On the other hand, distributions are also very interesting and offer a plethora of new and innovative solutions with MODX. The CI session seems to be a bit more technical (which I like), while Steve's session seems to be geared towards the larger crowd as well.
At the closing ceremonies, we will also be giving away a free Unlimited License as well as two 5-license packs, so be sure to stick around until the end!
More Information
The full schedule can be found here. There are still tickets available as well, so if you don't have them yet, get your tickets here. There are full and single-day tickets available. If you're new to MODX, there is also a special free introduction track on the first day.
What are you looking forward to at MODXpo?
MODXpo Context Winners
Some time ago we held a MODXpo contest where you could win a full ticket to the event, as well as modmore credit. There were only 2 entries unfortunately, where Yee Jee Tso won first prize with a modmore song he wrote and sung himself, and Aaron Ladage won second prize with a fancy graphic of the modmore logo in the clouds. Unfortunately both winners do not live close enough to Germany to attend the conference, so neither had a use for the MODXpo ticket.