The brand new Event Planner makes it easier to meet

The brand new Events section functions as the long-awaited eZ Community events calendar. But it is more than this, read-on.

Stronger bonds within the eZ Community

Every eZ Conference demonstrates how powerful physically meeting is to create strong bonds between people. Boosting the feeling of belonging to our Community is a key element in getting bigger. This is the first objective of this new Event planning section. Every eZ Community event, be it organized by eZ or spontaneously by members and partners, shall be listed there.

Reaching out to our neighbor communities

The other objective of this new tool is to better reach out to neighbor communities : PHP, Javascript & surrounding projects, MySQL and other DBMS + NoSQL tools, Content Management, Content editors, Web marketers, Standards communities, you name it. Meeting our neighbors is a good way to prime a link, and nurture it along time. All "external" events that you find interesting, and to which you will participate should be listed in the Event planner.

How this is working

The recommended way is to first spot the event you find interesting on lanyrd.com or joind.in. For instance, the eZ Conference 2011. If the event does not exist, you may want to either create it, or ask the event organizers to do so. In case the event is at your initiative (like organizing a local eZ Community user group), we warmly recommend to use tools like lanyrd.com or joind.in : they greatly help spreading the word, getting people to virtually sign-up, giving you an idea of the size of your audience, its type. More, these tools are very popular and well indexed by search engines.

Once you have the event URL, it is only about feeding it into share.ez.no, by clicking the "Propose an event" button from the Events home (you need to sign-in before), and letting you guide smoothly. Every few hours, the event data is updated automatically : if for instance new persons registered to the event in the meantime, from lanyrd.com or joind.in, they will pop-up under the event page on share.ez.no.

Be notified of new events posted by fellow eZ Community members

As easy as :

• Subscribing to the dedicated eZ Community events RSS feed,
• Following the @ezpublishevents Twitter account.

Kudos to the builders of this tool

Gilles Guirand, Steven E.Bailey, Robin Muilwijk & myself had hands-on, supported by the share.ez.no team & Paul. A big thank you to the team !

In case you find an issue, or have ideas on how to enhance the event planner, please report them in the share.ez.no issue tracker, selecting the "event planner" component (right column when editing an issue).

More to come

That's not all folks :)

We are planning on enhancing this tool over time to make it even easier to meet ! One idea is to propose an eZ Community User Group Organizer's toolkit, under the form of downloadable guidelines and items, so it becomes straight-forward to self-organize eZ Community meet-ups around the world. And this will include the necessary "How to fund my eZ Community user-group ?" answer.

In short : more tools to conquer the world.

See you all soon,
--
Nicolas