Symphony.

@Johanna, tea and wifi in Braunschweig sounds lovely. And you've convinced me about touring by train. I'm off to order my pass. :-)

I looked at the Art Otel website and they are now fully booked on the Saturday night. I booked AZIMUT Hotel which is close to the venue and cheap as chips - £117 for three nights in a single room.

They could use a Symphony developer or two though. See attached!

Attachments:

Screen Shot 2011-08-04 at 21.08.31.png

LOL!

Ah shame I was going to join you in the art'otel. I've booked myself into the Novotel which is a short walk away from art'otel. Not near the venue, mind. Can't win 'em all.

Will book train tickets when I'm back from holiday in a couple of weeks.

Hooray!

Hey Nick, are you training it accross the continent or flying? toying with a London flight. booked Novotel yesterday.

How the hell I ended up with a Queen size room and a sofa is anyones guess..

Any couch surfers welcome to sneak in via the kitchen :)

EDIT I think that donation would get a round or two in! gratitude for the help this forum brings everyday!

I just went ahead and booked train tickets. I commute to London daily so getting to Kings Cross isn't a problem. I'll arrive in Cologne about 15.30 on Friday, and depart 15.45 Monday.

FOUR WHOLE DAYS OF GERMANY FUNS!

I used the link Jonas found above. Annoyingly the website refused to give me a price for those journeys. A later journey, part of their special deal, was €69 one way, so I'm hoping the others won't be far off that. I went for an earlier train so I get the Monday afternoon to see wander the city, but the site had no prices for these other journeys. I duly gave my credit card details, so I presume someone will contact me shortly to tell me I've just spent €25,000 on a five hour train ride.

EDIT I think that donation would get a round or two in! gratitude for the help this forum brings everyday!

Solid work. Only €375 off the target. Keep the donations coming please!

Cool man.. gotta travel from the Caaaadifff of Wales to nodnoL and onwards from there. Thursday leave for me... wangled an extra day with work to "get settled" :) ehum 'beerage'

Not bad for £5,000 an hour... I hope you get the dining cart for that price.

Looks like it's time to book my hotel rooms, too.

Really looking forward to this!

@nickdunn: We are planning the Symposium for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Our idea was to drop in on Friday at 10:00, the official part starting at 11:00. Do you see any chance to arrive sooner?

[EDIT]: We will probably post the schedule tomorrow!

Need to get mine done too...

Nick, I was deciding whether to go by train too, would prefer it. How much did the whole journey come to? I may end up on the same trains!

Just booked mine at the Novotel, too. See you all there!

Nope, I'm already leaving London about 9am to get to Cologne for 3pm. There is an earlier train that gets in nearer midday but it means leaving home about 4am. I'll be no good to anyone after that! I wasn't aware it was scheduled fully for the Friday as well, I figured the Friday would be more informal: familiarisation, chatting etc, then like last year Sat/Sun would be the meat of the conference.

A schedule would be really useful.

Edit: I have emailed them asking them to cancel my train. If we need to be there early Friday then might need to book Thursday night hotel also (I presently have Fri/Sat/Sun), and maybe leave Sunday afternoon instead. What are other people's arrangements looking like? Will wait for a schedule. I'm off on holiday, see you in a week!

My stay is from Thurs night to Monday night..

Time away from the wife is precious :)... might drop the Monday though.. thinking about it.

The scheduled talks will take place on Saturday. On Friday we wanted to have some hours of "barcamp-style" meeting (dropping in at 10:00, starting at 11:00) and a short sightseeing tour in the late afternoon (i.e. before boozing in the evening).

So if you can not arrive before Friday afternoon, you can still attend most of the "super-official" stuff.

I'm coming Thurs eve to Sunday eve. I know its not pretty, but easyJet is still very cheap from Gatwick. Mine was £90 return.

I haven't weeded the garden for a while, so I'm already offsetting :-)

In terms of a potential conference workshop...

Although Symphony's true power clearly lies with more bespoke, development solutions I was thinking that it would be nice to have a session on how we each structure static content and images in our client sites.

I hate telling a client that they can't add a page. I love telling clients to forget WYSIWYG text editing. I love being in true control of styles and the look and feel of my sites but always want to offer the client as much flexibility as possible.

I have no doubt that some of you are doing this better than me, and perhaps I'm doing something better than you (don't hold me to that). So sharing ideas and solutions would be very helpful for me.

For those Londoners on train. would be cool if we we're on same train: I leave Thurs from St Pancras at 8:30 and get to Cologne 3:30pm.

Leave Monday afternoon 3:30pm.

OK, guys, here is the rough schedule. If you have any ideas, please post them.

Friday, September 30th

Saturday, October 1st

Sunday, October 2nd

How can we improve Symphony? Open discussions and development sessions:

It would be nice if other Symphony users and developers could join the discussions via Chat. (Time slots will be announced during the weekend.)

Looks fantastic, guys, thanks for putting this together. I'm so bummed I won't be able to go :(