Everyone was invited at the Hippo office's in Amsterdam or San Francisco to participate in the creation of cool projects. Any idea was welcome, as long as it was Hippo related (and could therefore be posted on the Hippo Forge).
Last time it was a big success, with the entire Hippo staff coding and having fun. This time they were reinforced with external developers who enthusiastically entered the friendly competition for a wide variety of reasons. Everyone, from consultants taking their first Hippo step to experienced Hippo partners, joined with Hippo colleagues and teamed up to speed-build their forge project.
While some teams had some start up problems there were quite a few wonderful Forge projects, sure they could use some polishing and sure it might only work for one corner case, but still, in half a day people created something tangible and -more importantly- something demo-able.
And even if people didn't learn anything, they at least had some good food ;-). As a Forge Friday would not be complete without abundant snacks, beer and pizza.
Hippo Rijkshuisstijl Archetype
The Sourcesense team was the first team to enter the stage. With their plugin (Maven Archetype) it becomes very easy to set up a website which is compliant with the current Rijkshuisstijl, the style guide of the dutch national government.
Simple Slide Show
Another interesting plugin used the Hippo repository and used its content to present a slide show. Simple, yet elegant and a good example of a new innovative plugin.
iPhone
While hard to demo on a beamer, the iPhone app which read content from the repository through a REST interface did WOW the audience, the slick interface and the iPhone-factor proved enough to win a second place!
Never Gonna Give You Up
A newbie team showed their love for Hippo CMS combined it with their other love: Rick Astley. Which resulted in their "Never Gonna Give You Up" project....
Google maps in CMS
The search engine, Google, with its seemingly endless amount of tools is a obvious project focus and two teams based their Forge project on a Google component. One allows the user to select an address based on Google Maps (yes, the other way around) which is then stored in the repository.
Google Translate
The other Google user was the eventual winner of the evening, it used Google translate to automatically present content in various languages, the user could then edit the results and store this in the CMS. This could allow for rapid creation of multiple language sites, while Google Translate is not infallible, it will do the bulk of the work for you (the good old 80-20 rule comes to mind). Here you can find the project on the forge.
Tripolis
Developers from Tripolis also came to work on a Hippo Forge project. They implemented a connection between the Tripolis Dialogue connector and the Hippo repository. While it did not work to their complete satisfaction, it was shown that the basic concept worked (this time only titles where synchronized, but if you can do a title, you can do the rest ;-).
Sysadmin work
Our very own infrastructure guys made a plugin which protects your preview website with a password and the access management is done from within Hippo CMS. They earned extra credits by placing their project on the Forge before their demo started.
PDF Export
What better way to show the versatility of Hippo and the repository then by automatically creating printable .pdf documents? While the result is basic, it is clear that the flexibility of open standards creates an environment in which everything is possible.
I hope to see you all next time!
