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