So, now it’s time for me to say goodbye to the Tridion community and hello to Contentstack. It’s been great to be a member of Hotel Tridion for over 19 years – it has taken me to over 12 different countries and I’ve met many interesting people. I’m grateful to Tridion for believing in me all those years ago and for all my colleagues who helped me with endless questions.

Last month I checked out of Hotel Tridion and checked into ‘Suite’ Contentstack – a headless CMS that focusses on a great editor experience and solid APIs. I always joked that Tridion is like the song Hotel California – “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWGFdL4tNW0

Living in Hotel Tridion taught me many things:

• Sharing is good – especially when it is tutorials or helpful code snippets. For example, when I visited the Tridion Developer Summit event in India many people came up to me and told me that my blog saved them time.
• Do things with positive intentions – When starting the Tridion Developer Summit my intention was to create an event to share solutions in a positive environment. It has been successful for 6 years with over 100 participants and 25 speakers each year. https://vimeo.com/378453697
• It’s ok to say “I don’t know” – even after doing Tridion for more than 19 years, there are still things I don’t know how to do in the platform.
• Being open and honest is always the best policy.
• Providing positive feedback about the things we like is very helpful. Giving constructive feedback is welcome – but be careful of the tone and consider the audience.
• People are always looking to improve things – ask what they would like to be improved and see if it’s possible to help
• Be nice

I’m looking forward to using these experiences in my role as a Solutions Architect at Contentstack. So far the team has made me feel very welcome – and it’s great to be part of a company where the product is growing fast and the customers are happy. I’m still learning a lot of new things, and that’s another aspect of the new job I like – growing both technically and personally.

Thank you to everyone who has supported and helped me over the years in Hotel Tridion. SDL will be taking over the lead of the Tridion Developer Summit and I wish them the best of luck with the event. And, wishing you much success with everything Tridion related – and if you’re ever curious about headless Content Management then let me know and I’ll be happy to show you a demo of Contentstack.

This is a meeting of the community around the Tridion Content Management System. A chance for Tridion consultants and partners to show what they’ve built with Tridion and a chance for SDL Tridion show what they have built inside the product. For me, it was a motivation to bring together these two parts of the community and for all of us to learn and share with each other. I’ve taken the risk myself to host the event. And I am thankful that the community, the partners and SDL have supported the event from the beginning. It is still a mystery to me how we even got this started! I blame it mostly on Nuno Linhares, who created the awesome Tridion MVP program and showed me what a community really looks and feels like, and I wanted to share the same feeling with the entire community of Tridion. And also to Quirijn Slings, Ron Grisnich and Nuno for saying ‘Yes!’ when I presented the idea to them 6 years ago….

This year is the year to show a preview of what is coming in the next 1-2 years of Tridion (and I don’t call it SDL Tridion, because, for me, it is and always has been Tridion). That means Tridion version 9.5 and beyond….

And – why do we call it the Tridion Developer Summit? (hint: the name was decided from the original API call of ‘TDS’ – when we would do the most serious actions in the API).

This year, among other topics, we will hear about the future of ‘Content Delivery’. At the end of Day 1, both Raimond Kempees (currently working inside the firewall of SDL) will discuss the vNext of SDL Content Delivery and Quirijn Slings, creator of DD4T (currently lurking outside the firewall of SDL) and will share his dream of what a DD4T 3.0 could look like. And, this is one reason why you should attend – to hear these views, and more importantly, to share a drink with both of them.

Day 2 is all about integrations and Docs – and we will see and hear what SDL is up to in this area – both from an inside perspective (from Niclas Cedermalm and Ivo van de Lagemaat) and also from a partner perspective from Content Bloom.

Finally, if you’re curious about SDL Docs, or have already used it in a project, make sure to join us after lunch on Day 2.

If you cannot attend – don’t worry – we record all the talks and make them available for free online at http://www.vimeo.com/tridontv

And, if you’d like to attend this year – we still have space – www.tridiondevelopersummit.com
November 5-6, 2019 in Amsterdam

The idea to submit new ideas to a Tridion Ideas site is not new….we have had this opportunity for many years now, originating with a request to Customer Support for a specific idea over a decade ago. The latest incarnation of this idea of Ideas being submitted to an Idea site is the SDL Community SDL Tridion DX Ideas site. So far, this is the site with the longest name, and that means….well, I don’t know what that means, but it exists and it’s THE place to be for getting your great ideas to the big minds behind the SDL firewall and in front of people who decide what goes in, and out, of the product.

First, sign-in and create an account at https://community.sdl.com. If you get an error while logging in (like me), chances are you once had logged in with that browser sometime before their update, and now you need to either delete your cookies, or just try with another browser. I tried with Firefox and I got back in.

Next, start browsing the current ideas – there’s some really great ones there! Upvote liberally, and feel free to comment and leave your own 2 cents, or your mark on the next greatest feature.

Finally, this is the time to tell the world the idea that you’ve been dreaming about for ages.

I’ve submitted a few ideas recently.

First, I would like to see the location an item is published to in the Tridion GUI. So, I added an idea to the site and you can see it here: https://community.sdl.com/ideas/sdl-tridion-dx-ideas/i/sdl-tridion-sites-ideas/add-icons-to-list-view-to-show-if-page-component-is-published-to-staging-or-live

Another idea I submitted was to see the filename in the Tridion GUI.

https://community.sdl.com/ideas/sdl-tridion-dx-ideas/i/sdl-tridion-sites-ideas/add-a-filename-column-to-the-structure-group-list-view

This was a request from a client many years ago and I implemented it as a GUI Extension. (See a similar example here) However, for most clients they don’t have this option in their GUI. Finding an index page in a long list of Pages can be painful if we need to open each individual page, but with the extension we can see all the Pages (and URLs) in the list view. Will Price added a comment to my idea, and suggested it’s also a quick and easy way to review URLs for SEO. The community at work with ideas exchange!

Finally, the last idea is to not re-publish Multimedia Components if they have not changed since the Page was last published. This would improve performance time a lot and also reduce the load on the Publisher and Deployer. https://community.sdl.com/ideas/sdl-tridion-dx-ideas/i/sdl-tridion-sites-ideas/do-not-re-publish-binaries-if-they-have-not-changed-and-have-been-previously-published-to-that-target

How to stay on top of new ideas? If you would like to get an email with a list of the new ideas on a daily or weekly basis, head over to https://community.sdl.com/ideas/ and at the bottom select the Email digest options. Then, in the Tridion ideas site, turn ‘Ideation notifications’ on. That’s it!

What can you do now? Create a new idea, blog about it, write it on the Ideas Exchange wall, and maybe we will see it in a product release soon and we will have shared the idea to the world and maybe have made it a little better….

And come to the next Tridion Developer Summit in Amsterdam on 5-6 November, 2019!

1. Pair-programming is as much about learning new keyboard shortcuts as it is supporting the one doing the typing. We avoided many environment and coding issues by being able to swap people or computers when the going got rough.

2. Code > Powerpoint

3. Drinks > Sleep

4. Alchemy is not only a framework, it’s a way of life. Think of a WordPress plugins-type system all baked into Tridion, and with Dev tools that integrate directly into Visual Studio. Yes. Yes! This is the coolest thing since sliced Razor Mediator code!

5.  Using the Tridion Content Porter for moving Pages and all dependencies is like asking a car salesman for a car that flies.  Also, Content Porter is not called Magic Porter or Page Porter.

6. After 2 days of hard work our there was more talk about work on our off day than work on our work day

7. There’s a common feeling within the group of a ‘wish list’ of requested features.

8. Where there’s a song there’s a way.

9. Bottle-fed sheep eat during the middle of the night. Peacocks are louder than roosters.

10. Never look at John Winter’s phone when he says he wants to show you a photo. Ever.

11. Shellfish and Seafood are the same word in Portugese, and in English Shellfish and Sea Insects is also the same word (well, kind of)

12. Gin and tonic drinks never go out of style and they do a great job of making them in Portugal. (Ice in the glass first!)

13. When the bell rings, run for the bus.