Last week at Linuxtag 2011 Drupal and TYPO3 shared a booth. Both Open Source CMS systems are immensely popular and used for large projects. Drupal has a large share in the United States, while TYPO3 finds a large customer/user base in Europe. In 2010 both projects had separate booths at Linuxtag, but the Berlin user-groups of Drupal and TYPO3 decided to share a booth, because of the excellent spirit there is between both user groups. Bodo Eichstadt was largely responsible for organizing the TYPO3 part. Thanks a ton for that, Bodo. Stephan Luckow was his fellow, organizational wise, but then for Drupal.


Even though this years number of visitors to our common booth was minimal compared to other years, we really enjoyed our joint venture, showing that when it comes down to it we are all one big family. The pinnacle of that week was when Bodo and myself were invited to an Ethiopian dinner on Friday in the heart of Berlin with the guys from the Drupal internationalization code sprint that was taking place during the same week. Ethiopian dinner with Drupal developersMany similarities here again as some weeks ago TYPO3 had it's major code sprint in Berlin. It was great to meet the developers and the conversations going on were not much different then being around TYPO3 developers. Lots of geeky jokes. I was especially pleased to get to know a fellow countryman and Drupal developer called Philip Vergunst. Philip is currently building the website for dutch parliament, an assignment that was very much sought after by dutch TYPO3 companies, as TYPO3 is already used for quite some governmental projects especially for municipalities combined in TYPO3GEM.  I definitely hope to meet all Drupal and TYPO3 people next year again in a combined booth. Maybe we can even share an Open Source CMS area with the guys for Zope and Plone as well. There is still one wall to tear down in Berlin.

For me personally Linuxtag was not so interesting for showing the visitors what TYPO3 is all about, but I did have some very nice meet-ups with some other community managers like Jos Poortvliet from Open Suse and Shawn Beardley from OTRS. It was inspiring to share our experiences concerning communities.