I drove the whole family to Holland as it coincided with our autumn break. We stayed with a good friend of mine in The Hague (where I lived for about 10 years and which also happens to be my city of birth). And if all that wasn't good enough, I got to go to the OpenForce Europe 2008 conference and see my DNN friends. I have to admit that the conference is more about hanging out with your buddies than trying to learn or sell something. True, I did go to highly interesting presentations (like the 'dive deep into DNN 5' by Charles Nurse). And I did sponsor and represent the Dutch DNN Usergroup. But the one thing we all look forward to at OpenForce is sitting down for a beer with the people you normally only 'see' through chat and email. As a 'DNN Team lead' I am part of the weekly 'core team chat'. In this forum we touch base and discuss the issues before us. So it is special to be able to convene a 'live core team chat' during the conference. Granted, there were still a lot of people missing, but it is a rush to be in the same room as Shaun Walker, Nik Kalyani, Charles Nurse, Cathal Connelly, Chris Hammond, Sebastian Leupold, Stefan Cullmann, Erik van Ballegoij, Leigh Pointer, Stefan Kamphuis, Peter Schotman and Ernst Peter Tamminga.
Another opportunity that we have with this event (and more here than at OpenForce US) is to further the localization agenda. There was a good attendance from Germany and Belgium. Together with the Dutch and stray French we had a good group to sit down and discuss progress on localization with the core team architects (Shaun Walker and Charles Nurse at this conference). It is our time of the year where we can explain to the North Americans how important localization is to us and how complex it is. I convened a meeting on this last year and repeated this on the Monday night. During this meeting you get a good sense of what people are struggling with and what priorities they have. And of course, these are not uniform across the group. Anyway, long story short, we had a lively discussion (lots of hand waving etc) in English mostly and we managed to get a priority list for the core team to implement. What people may not realize is that some of the groundwork has already been done in DNN 5.0. So in my estimation we can have page and module title localization by DNN 5.1.
A personal high note of the event was the installation of Document Exchange on dotnetnuke.com. This is a result of the work I've been doing with Néstor Sánchez on the so called 'documentation project' for DNN. When this goes live you will be able to browse articles and other resources on dotnetnuke.com in similar style as MSDN. DMX handles the workflow and an addon called DocView renders converted documents as HTML on screen. I'll let you know when it goes live. For now the involved people are working hard to fill the repository with content. So the module has been succesfully installed on 'the mothership'. It was kind of a champagne moment as I sat down with Shaun and we installed it using his laptop and the available wireless connection. As he poised to click 'upload' he looked at me one final time to ask me if it was OK. Sure. Click. And there it was. Another milestone for Bring2mind.