Embrace Neos now! (updated)

Now is the time to be involved with Neos which is gaining more and more traction in the market!

If you have read our article about Inspiring Conference 2015 you already have an idea about the recent developments of Neos itself, the Flow framework and the commitment of the core team. Continuous releases (version 1.2.5 being the latest one right now, with 2.0 beta just around the corner) have brought greatly anticipated features and the drop of the CLA to contribute to Neos and the announced move to Gibhub significantly lower the barriers for contribution. Furthermore the three core developers Robert Lemke, Karsten Dambekalns and Christian Mueller founded Flownative as a professional services firm dedicated solely to Neos and Flow.

COPE as strategic focus

The COPE concept - create once, publish everywhere - tackles a fundamental problem of content creation in companies today: the same content has to be created multiple times for different output channels. There are just so many things wrong with this, that it is actually a bit surprising, that a CMS like Neos is just now articulating its COPE direction. As announced during InspiringCon by Rasmus Skjoldan and Daniel Hinderink, COPE is going to be a central concept for Neos going forward. Have a look at the recording of their talk: 

The benefits are so large and tangible: greatly reduced duplication of work and much easier maintenance of content. Just imagine product specifications which need to be published on a website, on the intranet, in the manual, in a brochure, in the product documentation... 

With this announcement Neos got a greatly emphasized strategic focus on quality content creation and its claim to be a multi-channel delivery platform for that content. The COPE decision helps to focus the development of Neos and makes it clear, what the framework for future product decisions is. In their presentation Rasmus and Daniel summed it up as "creation and curation".

Way beyond websites

The logical conclusion is that Neos is not just a CMS for building websites. It is rather a tool for all kinds of use cases around content in a web context. We have already created some concepts and architectures for web applications with Neos as an integral part: 

• a document creation & management system for a quality management process, where Neos was used for document editing, a versioning workflow, document administration and user authentication
• a multi-channel content delivery system which allows for offline consumption of web content
• an email-marketing system where Neos is used to edit the content and integrates with the distribution system 
• Neos as a wiki system for knowledge management

Or think about trends such as content-driven e-commerce, where a CMS and an e-commerce system work hand-in-hand to deliver a superior experience to the customer. Have a look at TechDivision's article about Magento and Neos for example.

Get started!

The time is right to start investing in Neos, to build the critical knowledge and experience you need to succeed in tomorrows content management market. InspiringCon showed that the Neos core team still has a myriad of ideas for making Neos easier, faster, more reliable and robust, giving it better integration capabilities, performance and security features.

If you are unsure if Neos will work for your project, you need help in making Neos work for you or you just have an idea that involves creating and delivering content to your customers, we are happy to help!