Neos meets Rhein/Main

The local Neos community in the Rhein/Main area met for the first time at the Social Impact Lab in Frankfurt on 20th July 2016. Nine participants, ranging from core team member to developers totally new to Neos, discussed about the CMS, the community and marketing possibilities.

First things first: A Neos introduction

Core team member Sebastian Kurfürst started the Meetup by bringing everybody up to speed with a short presentation about the ideas and principles behind Neos, highlighting the most important features and functionality. After that, the discussion quickly turned to the topic of contributing to Neos. Especially for the new developers, the question of how to get started with Neos is a very important one. The more experienced participants highlighted the possibilities, including Slack and the Discourse forum. 

The chicken & egg problem, or Nobody Ever Got Fired For IBM

As all agencies working with Neos know, convincing bigger customers to use Neos is often rather hard. The Meetup participants discussed this topic for quite a while, contributing their experiences of why Neos is often not considered as an alternative. The reasons were manifold, including:

• Neos itself is not well known and therefore customers usually don‘t request it explicitly
• Agencies still consider it risky to invest time and build knowledge in Neos, since adoption seems to be growing too slowly
• There is a lack of big clients, or rather, as turned out in the discussion, a lack of knowledge about which big names have already adopted it
• Some parts of Neos, especially TypoScript, can still be a challenge to master

On the other hand, we also found lots of things that have improved over the last year:

• With the new logo and brand, it has become much easier to actually market Neos
• The release schedule makes communication with customers easier and builds trust in the project
• Documentation is rapidly improving, making it easier for developers to get started
• The community is very accessible and welcoming for newcomers, answering questions and helping over the first hurdles of adoption
• The system itself is modern, great-looking and has all essential features
• The React rewrite is technically very interesting, attracting attention from a new group of developers

Onward to glory!

Towards the end, we had a lively exchange of ideas for improving Neos, communicating better and spreading knowledge about Neos. Lots of ideas were thrown around and Sebastian couldn't wait to start implementing them.

I'd like to thank all participants for their contributions and Jens and Timm for offering to help organizing a Neos meetup at their companies, something that we will certainly make use of. Also, a big thank you goes to Lelesys, who organized the location, food and drinks and also sponsored half of the costs for the Meetup. Thanks a lot! I consider this a great start for the Neos community in Rhein/Main and am very much looking forward to the next meetups, which will likely take place in early September and mid/late October.