It's just two weeks until my first self hosted Flow workshop and things ended up differently than expected: very few registered - and only for the advanced track - but I got several inquiries for custom workshops and inhouse seminars.

So I wonder: is there a demand for this kind of workshop (2-4 days covering most aspects of Flow)? How can I help freelancers and agenies getting started or improve their skills with Flow and Neos? Which topics are of most interest? And what's this Branch thing anyway?

Custom workshop has a lots of value for me, and after the first try, I confirm that for me the best way. As this kind of workshop is related to real project, it can also be a nice way to the Flow team to have real feedback about how the framework is used.

To have an overview of a framework, normal workshop work nicely, but I prefere to try by myself first ;) Selfmade men powered.

It highly depends on the learner type. Some need a broad overview first, for those a generic workshop would be good. Others need a concrete project to work on, a custom workshop fits them better.

Currently those working with Flow probably have some project at hand and need some specific workshop and/or consulting. I'd say the demand for a generic workshop will rise throughout the next year, as Flow gains traction and is requested more.

Some of the feedback I got also was in the line of: "I think I know all that already – the topics are too general". So coming up with more specific courses might help – although I'm convinced that even those who know a bit about Flow already will get a lot of information besides the mentioned topics.

Another point might be that sending X developers to somewhere – and even for a bunch of days – is more expensive than an inhouse seminar.

I agree with Karsten, currently we need nice projet on Flow to show how the framework can help us a lot, and after that we need to communicate about those project.

Before training dev, we need to be more attractive and visible.

In my experience (with Open Source School) you mainly get people to book your training for 2 reasons: (1) they have a project to start soon -- or they're already in trouble -- and lack the know how. (2) you got a hype hot topic and everybody thinks "we need that now" even if they dont (like HTML5). With Flow imho you won't get the crowd that is ahead of the curve anyway, those people might need consulting every here and there, but they don't need a standard training (that's why you can sell your advanced training better than the standard one, I guess). Cracks don't visit trainings. So, (1) might not be the case very often for Flow at the moment and (2) is not yet here either.

If I were to promote Flow trainings I would concentrate on the practical value, keep it as close as possible to the potential, actual outcome for the attendees: What can you DO after you got the training? What kind of PROBLEM can you solve you couldnt before? In the end you dont want to use Flow or Zend or Symfony, in the end you want to solve problems. If I go to my boss and tell him I want to spend 2000 (?) Euros, he most likely will ask me: What do we get for it? Why do we need that? That's the angle here in my view. (Of course you also need publicity for Flow, Karsten is absolutely right, that's a different topic, but a prereq for broad success with trainings, I guess)