Community, Code, and Content: Highlights from Sulu:Touch 2024
Our first-ever Sulu conference, Sulu:Touch, took place on December 4, 2024, and it was a huge success. 60 participants from all over Europe traveled to Vienna, Austria, to meet each other and learn about content management and Sulu news.
The day was packed with inspiring talks and constructive interactions between Sulu developers, clients, partners, and the Sulu team. Without a doubt, everyone took away valuable information and insights from this dynamic, value-packed day.
Keynote highlights: Content Modelling with Carrie Hane
A conference keynote typically touches some deep insights, and so did the Sulu:Touch keynote, delivered by Carrie Hane, independent consultant for digital solutions and co-author of “Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow,” a go-to resource for sustainable digital publishing.
Can you sell structured content as a solution? Probably not. Most people aren't concerned with structured content as such, but rather with the indirect effects of well-designed content structures: flexibility, scalability, multichannel delivery, and more. Their ultimate goals are: customer loyalty, building awareness, driving conversions, and increasing revenue. Content modeling is but a stepping stone for achieving these goals.
As a content manager or web agency, you need to understand the clients’ “wants” and translate them into “needs” that properly structured content can deliver. After all, a well-defined strategic content model defines 80% – 90% of a website’s content. Building on this foundation, you can sell the solution that structured content delivers. The result is a win-win situation for agencies and their clients.
If you want to dig deeper into this topic, Carrie is available to consult on content strategy and content modeling, coach teams on adopting more efficient content operations, and train teams on how to do content modeling and content-driven design.
Great “Get together” of Sulu Community & nice introductions to new and upcoming features for 2025!
The Past and the Future of Sulu CMS
The three main talks at Sulu:Touch went deep into Sulu’s past and the bright future of the developer-first CMS.
History of Sulu CMS
After Bernd Hepberger introduced the participants to the event and its objectives, Thomas Schedler took the audience on a journey through Sulu’s evolution. Sulu CMS started as a project by MASSIVE ART, a full-service digital agency, to address the challenges of delivering tailored content solutions. Originally named ZOOLU and built on the Zend framework, Sulu soon became a versatile, open source Symfony CMS with a global community of users and supporters, surpassing one million downloads in 2024.
Sulu stands firm on the two pillars “technology” and “usability.” Built on Symfony, Sulu is designed to scale with the users’ evolving needs. Editors and admins love using Sulu because it provides flexibility without complexity.
Sulu, the company, learned much along the way.
- Companies often underrate content management despite its importance for long-term success, a blind spot that customers and prospects frequently need to be made aware of.
- Protecting a project’s vision is easier said than done, and Sulu had to make several tough decisions to keep Sulu CMS on track.
- PHP turned out to be a future-proof technology and a wonderful basis for a CMS.
- A dynamic project like Sulu CMS requires a delicate balance between innovation and business.
Backed by almost 30 years of development, the future of Sulu is bright: a new, advanced content storage system and an AI integration are just two innovations that will take Sulu CMS another big step forward.
Sulu 3.0 Insights
The long-awaited version 3.0 of Sulu CMS will be released in early 2025. After the keynote and a coffee break, Thomas and Alex revealed the most significant innovation in Sulu 3.0: a completely revamped content storage system.
Storing unstructured and hierarchical data in classic relational databases is intrinsically difficult, and current solutions don’t have the performance or the features required to handle typical CMS data.
Sulu 3.0 introduces a new storage system that meets the requirements of modern content management systems: optimized loading, built-in versioning and drafting, a flexible architecture based on Doctrine ORM entities, support for powerful SQL or DQL queries, and more.
The new content storage model embraces all dimensions of a page of content: locales, workflow stages, and versions. It enhances the Main entity with structure-related information and optimizes query performance.
For broad adoption, users of the current PHPCR solution will find a smooth migration path to the new content storage system.
Sulu AI
Sure, AI is currently in a hype cycle, but it’s apparent that AI will stay relevant, especially in the core fields of content management: writing, editing, translating, optimizing for SEO, brainstorming, and refining ideas. Large Language Models (LLMs) are strong in these disciplines, but the key to productive usage is the level of integration in CMS workflows.
Sulu’s new open source AI bundle aims to amplify the productivity of content management teams. Seamlessly embedded in the CMS, the AI bundle connects to the LLM of choice, from the leading models in the field to self-hosted LLMs.
For extra convenience, Sulu will offer AI as a service through its first commercial product, the Sulu AI Platform. Companies who want to avoid the hassle of setting up and connecting the Sulu AI bundle with various AI providers can get the same productivity-boosting features as a zero-management service instead.
The Sulu AI bundle and AI Platform bundle are under development, with many great features still to come.
Community Activities: Brain Snacks and Networking
A big shoutout to our passionate community! In four Brain Snacks talks, community members shared valuable insights about content management and open source development that resonated well with the audience.
datenwerk: Accessibility
Melanie Groissmaier of datenwerk presented an aspect of Web development that is of utmost importance, yet frequently neglected. Accessibility should be a default feature of every Web app. Existing and upcoming laws (such as the EU Accessibility Act) enforce built-in accessibility for websites. Apart from that, an accessible website provides clear business benefits. Still, developers, UI and UX designers are struggling to make websites accessible.
In her talk “Building the Web for Everyone,” Melanie shared plenty of information to give Sulu developers a head start in accessibility, from visual aspects like self-explaining links, the appropriate color contrast over the Accessibility Not-Checklist, to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
No more excuses for inaccessible websites!
Tailr: Easy Sulu Admin UI Customization
At Sulu, we are cautious about assigning a difficulty level to admin UI customization, but when a Sulu partner calls admin UI customization an easy take, we’re both proud and eager to listen to the talk. Toon Verwerft of Tailr showcased a sophisticated auction UI as an example of the extraordinary flexibility of the Sulu admin UI.
For their client Zangersheide, Tailr extended the admin UI with two custom bundles, inline edits, workflows, an advanced search form, a DeepL translation functionality, custom forms, calculated fields, and a live auction dashboard. (See our Tailr & Zangersheide case study.)
Sulu + React = ❤️
Slides: Easy Sulu Admin UI Customization
Oliver Kossin: How to Contribute to Open Source Projects
As a true FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project, Sulu relies on ongoing contributions by its community. Oliver Kossin, Symfony and React developer at MASSIVE ART, contributes to open source projects in various ways, including giving talks about how to contribute to open source projects.
In this Brain Snacks talk, Oliver walked the audience through a proper GitHub contribution workflow, from creating a GitHub fork to opening a pull request.
FOSS FTW!
Slides: How to contribute to open source projects
Platform.sh: How to Finance FOSS Projects
A part of open source contributions that’s often overlooked is financing. Contributions to open source projects are usually done for the love of the project (or the idea behind it), but love doesn’t pay the bills. Vincenzo “Vinnie” Russo of Platform.sh gave a talk on monetizing open source software, presenting various models for generating revenue from an open source project.
Open source is not just about writing software—it’s about enabling users and building communities. Traditionally viewed as non-commercial endeavors, the open source projects have evolved to embrace several monetization strategies, from donations and paid support to selling proprietary add-ons or services around the open source core. Platform-as-a-Service solutions further advance the field by enabling companies to maintain their open source commitment while generating revenue through infrastructure and value-added services.
Money is an enabler.
Networking Evening
The conference concluded with an extensive networking event that enabled the participants to connect with each other and discuss the takeaways from the various talks and Brain Snacks.
It was exciting to be part of the first Sulu Partner Conference.
The historical introduction and the continuation through data models to modern modular AI features was informative and valuable
The First One, But Certainly Not The Last
Sulu:Touch 2024 revealed and intensified the deep connections within the Sulu community. We observed participants from various countries, as well as a healthy mix of decision-makers and developers joining us to learn about and discuss the future of Sulu and content management.
Could we have held our first Sulu conference earlier? Maybe, but at the end of 2024, the time was just right for discussing the next big advances in the CMS space.
Should we do another Sulu:Touch? Absolutely! As soon as the day ended, Sulu:Touch 2025 already started taking shape in our heads.
See you there!
