At Liip every developer gets a budget for so-called “hackdays” as well as for individual further training. Trouble is, it seems like most of us are a bit too dedicated to our respective teams, and so many Liipers end up using less than their given budget, which is a pity since in order for Liip to be able to pull on lots of fun state-of-the-art projects, we need to make sure we all play around with cool new stuff and help shape the future in the interest of our clients. At the same time, when we blog about a successful hackday it seems we make a few people jealous. Anyway, Jordi wanted to spend some of his “conference time” setting up a PHP stand at the up-coming FrOSCamp.

Meanwhile, things have started to happen in Symfony2-land with setting up a project to build the foundations for a CMS. Liip decided to dive right in and join the efforts along with other developers from around the world, including the lead developers of Apostrophe, Diem and Sympal. We at Liip felt that the JCR specification could be a useful foundation. We already started the Jackalope open source project at Liip to create a JCR client library for PHP a while back, where we adopted the interfaces from the Typo3 Flow3 project. So I was beginning to check out Flow3 and noticed quite a few similarities and twittered if someone would want to join me to compare the two frameworks at FrOSCamp.

So Fabienne and I sat down and decided that instead of using her marketing budget for something boring, we could use it to do something big and awesome! We figured we should try to get together people to work on the Symfony CMF and Jackalope. I also mentioned that we had been delaying a hackday to write a CouchDB ODM implementation for Doctrine2 along the lines of the already existing MongoDB support. Fabienne suggested that we invite lots of developers to come to Zurich to join us at FrOSCamp and that Liip could help cover their expenses if necessary. From my personal experience I can say that there is nothing that helps online communication more than having met someone even just once for a few hours in person.

So here we are with 4 hackfests lined up with Liip participation:

  • DokuWiki
  • Symfony CMF (actually we still need to figure out an agenda for this one)
  • Jackalope
  • CouchDB ODM

It looks like the number of Liipers at FrOSCamp will still grow a bit but for now Pierre, Jordi, Chregu, David, Ebi and myself will surely be there. I hope that Penny, Brian and Dan will also make it and maybe a few others too. What's even cooler, the following people have confirmed that they have accepted our invitation:

  • Benjamin Eberlei (Doctrine 2)
  • David NĂźschler (JCR lead)
  • Karsten Dambekalns (Flow3)
  • Nils Adermann (phpBB)
  • Sebastian SchĂźrmann
  • Thibault Duplessis (Diem CMS)
  • Vincent Jousse (first outside contributor to Jackalope)

Not yet confirmed but likely:

  • Etienne Kneuss (maybe he'll show us PHATM?)
  • Francesco Trucchia
  • Till Klampaeckel

Of course, regard this blog post as an invitation to join as well!