Few weeks ago, I participipated to the eZConference & Open Nordic 2008 in Skien in Norway. There's some things you must now about Norway :

• It's difficult to get there, even by plane, or car or camel...
• It's absurdly expensive (150€ to do 40km in cab)
• There's no night
• Most of Norvegian is speaking english, hopefully !
• They eat caviar for breakfast
• Salmon is absurdly cheap

By the way, as you can imagine, Norway is a big country with few persons in it. So there's a lot of space and they are very concerned by the quality of their life : cities are clean and services are perfect.

Open Nordic 2008

The conference stood in the Skien Ibsenhuset, a very large conference hall, where both conferences, eZConference and Open Nordic, happened.

The main subject on eZ were :

• Multiple file upload in 4.1 : it has been made in complement of the webdav feature which does not work on all platforms (Did I say Windows ???).
• OE 5 : integrating Tiny MCE, this WYSIWG editor rocks ! After having worked with HTMLArea, FCKEditor and the former OE, it seems to be the more powerfull and intuitive work ever done. At least, it is a very visible work.
• Support for OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office document import and export in eZ via a nested toolbar in the editor : you can open content directly on an eZ instance via a Java connector and modify it as you want. When you save it, it will send the data to the eZ instance and update your website. Very powerfull and I guess very similar to the Sharepoint feature.
• Site factory and CSS Editor : two features which are made to ease the deployment and configuration of eZ websites. The first is a console tool allowing to deploy in one command an entire site with a specified configuration (it uses REST). The second one is a kind of webmaster gadget in full java which will allow people to modify their design in few clicks : you activate a design mode on your frontend and then you can select each element of the page and then change some defined css values, like background-color or what you want.
• ezComponents integration : eZGuys are close to completely lighten the kernel libs by integrating the eZComponents. The most important change will happen when the integration of the ezcTemplate will be effective. It's a big step for the eZCommunity because we will have to deal with a strict template engine (at last !).
• And some new components like Document and Search.

By the way, it was a great time, sharing our knowledge and drinking beers at the at the pub...

Oslo

And then I travelled a bit to reach Oslo... Country, sea and half-light :

Conclusion

It was a great trip, lot of emotions, lot of exchanges between people from different countries, and one pledge : next year I will be there, Monseigneur.

:-D

After a fruitful conversation with Nicolas Pastorino, he said me that he was waiting the new version of eZDebug. I was focusing on other extension so I completely forgot that. So, I've started the development of the version 1.0 fore Firefox3, in six monthes dev tools have evolved (happily for me) and it will be easier to test and develop. I will make the following arrangements :

• It won't be in a new window but in the sidebar or in a new tab (like the magic CTRL+MAJ+C).
• It won't be necessary to hack the kernel --> So it can be used for any eZ instance.
• It will be possible to filter by category or by typing something.
• A clear "debug button" will allow to hide the debug in the internet page.

If you got some remarks or suggestions on this, just leave a comment.