A whole week of Neos, in the most intense way: a big part of the Neos team met in Rosenheim last Monday to work for fours days and nights on the next major versions of Neos and Flow, followed by the Inspiring Conference which did its name credit and inspired the audience and team likewise.

If the talks and discussions were an indicator of the maturity of Neos and Flow, you could sense that both products have grown up. The topics shifted from "Neos will have" and "we plan to" to sharing experiences from projects done with Neos. The whole team received quite some helpful feedback, including about day to day problems with the stability and setup of Neos. The team is aware of many of these problems and is working hard on addressing them. Like in every Open Source project though, the most important contribution by the community in this regard is constructive criticism and meaningful error reports. We are glad that we got plenty of it during the last two weeks which allows us to make Neos 2.0 and Flow 3.0 two great product releases.

At the beginning of Inspiring 2015 I gave a short keynote, sharing what the Neos team did in the past, what we are tackling at present and what plans we have for the future. Some part is also dedicated to explaining why we founded Flownative and which role we imagine for Flownative in the Neos eco-system.

Neos team members Daniel Hinderink and Rasmus Skjoldan spent the last couple of months distilling a product vision for Neos which goes beyond what we are dealing with in our day-to-day development in the core team. They discuss rough ideas as well as the shaped concept with the whole team and presented the our common vision of the future of content management in their keynote.

There are a lot more topics I'd love to share with you, which I currently can't by means of this short blog post (first I need to catch up with work …). However, my conclusion after this week is that the Neos project has left its teenage years and continues to grow a friendly and helpful community. Not all is rosy – there are bugs, there are disappointed users – but how could it be different? When you look at what has been achieved during the past year (multi-language support, new rights management, very effective speed improvements) and what the team has already started working on (lower barriers for contributors, follow a product vision), Neos is the greatest project I can imagine being part of.

Thank you to the whole Neos team, who spent a whole week of volunteer work in a row, thanks to all attendees who inspired us with great conversations and offered help for the Neos project and to TechDivision for organising a truly inspiring event.

Michael Lihs published a nice photo set of the Neos sprint and the Inspiring Conference. On Slideshare you'll find the slides of my keynote and of the Future of Content Management talk by Daniel and Rasmus.