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Greetings from Norway!

Today was the first day of the eZ publish conference here in Skien, Norway, where the eZ systems headquarter is located. Before today we had 3 days of eZ crew activities, since the complete eZ systems team from over the world is currently in Norway.

But before I start with my little roundup, I'd like to announce some stuff that we (eZ) presented during this conference:

1. The eZ publish online editor (a WYSIWYG web interface) changed it's license. From now on, it is not commercial any more, but released under the GPL and will be shipped with the next eZ publish release.

2. We are starting to develop the "eZ platform", which is an enterprise level platform for PHP development and will be the basis for a future eZ publish release. eZ platform will consist of the eZ application server, which is based on the eZ components. eZ publish will be build on top of that.

But now, let's talk about some social stuff. ;)

On Monday (where we left Dortmund at 2:00 and I did not sleep before that), we arrived in Skien around 11:00, had lunch all together and I went to bed afterwards. That night we spent with pizza and beer at the "eZ bar" (the office).

On Tuesday morning we splitted up into task related groups (developers and management) and had some internal education talks, e.g. Derick about the usage of Xdebug. After lunch we went to a "wild-life"park, where we took some team-building activities. This was amazingly great and lasted from clay pigeon shooting over climbing to canu driving. Absolutly cool and much fun. After that, we went for some "wild-life" dinner (deer).

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Wednesday was the eZ partner day, which already belonged to the eZ publish conference. The development teams seized the chance for a discussion phase. We (the eZ components team) planned the upcoming components release 2006.2 (formally known as 1.2), which will probably include a lot of cool new components and features. For example eZ Feed (for reading and writing Atom/RSS feeds), eZ Graph (for rendering charts) and many more.

Today was finally the first day of the official part of the eZ conference. After Derick gave an overview on the current status of our enterprise PHP library, the eZ components, I continued with a 2 hours entrance workshop. The number of attendees was really large and everyone seemed to be quite amazed. At least, that was what they told me. A nice quote I heard from someone was "this is the cleanest piece of PHP code I've ever seen", which does not really sound bad, does it? Later today we will have the eZ Awards dinner, which also sounds quite promising.

Finally, tomorrow, Kore and me will leave Skien again around 10:00 to catch our plane at 13:00 in Oslo Torp. I expect to be home around 19:00 then, where I'm pretty much looking forward to see my sweet girl friend Carmen again. Sadly only until Saturday morning, around 7:00, when we again leave direction Bonn, for the FrOSCon.

Anyway, another great evening here in Norway is waiting. Stay tuned.