My neighbour gladly called my attention to the Multimediatreff, a relaxed conference that is held about three times a year, this last saturday on the topic: Frameworks and Content-Management-Systems.
It was held in a very nice conference center in cologne, and from what I heard about 200 people attended. The first two topics were on Joomla! and barrier-free Typo3. Since I am more the framework guy, I did not enjoy them too much. At least I got some input on how a barrier-free website has to function. The Joomla! presentation supported my prejudice, that programming in and for Joomla! produces ugly code.
I did like the presentations on frameworks, the most interesting being the CakePHP presentation by Timo Derstappen, since I haven't looked into Cake for about one and a half years. I have seen that with the new to come version 2, the framework became even better, now supporting easy code generation and flexible site generation. But its still somehow a Ruby clone and forces me too much in my programming style.
The Zend Framework presentation was done by Carsten Möhrke, who also wrote the first german ZF Book. He showed the creation of a blog using Zend Framework, being the Hello World example for frameworks. He specifically showed, that you can use anything you want as a model, a Zend_Db_Table object or any other object. He also showed something like a Data-Mapper pattern in his application. I got some ideas from this I probably will write about some later time.
I also enjoyed the Rails presentation, because I never got the chance to look the Ruby guys at work of the shoulder. But this is even worse than CakePHP was my first observation. I am no fan of ActiveRecord being forced upon you as Model implementation.
The pizza battle, mysteriously announced by the host, was another highlight, as well as the drinks and snacks in between. All in all I can highly recommend the Multimediatreff for the next time.