Kasper Skårhøj during T3BOARD06 at Fiescheralp/Swiss.

It's important that the whole community gets involved in this process. The point of version 4.5 is not to change for the sake of change but to make TYPO3 a better tool for everyone using it daily. I assume lots of people will fear changes that makes complex jobs harder to do – or which require them to introduce new habits. I'm pretty sure we can't avoid that completely, but it will make a huge difference whether we collaborate broadly or not in the development of the next release. The first question we must ask ourselves is; What is our (interface) identity? Maybe you can help to mould the answer if you reflect on why you like TYPO3. What are our core attributes that you love and we therefore can't miss out on?

My Mac-purchase and version 4.5 is not such a coincidence. As a personal primer the Mac is an educational experience that teaches me two things; firstly how it feels being a beginner and secondly how well beginners can be guided into a system with higher levels of complexity under the surface. At the time of this writing it is still quite unsure exactly how the usability improvements will look like and, unlike any previous development of TYPO3, I expect this challenge to include mostly non-technical resources from the TYPO3 community.

An effective improvement of usability requires more than wild guesses from developers but analysis and testing far before a single line of code is written. But what does Mr. TYPO3 actually know about usability? After all I created a system that was perfectly usable for myself. Luckily, today there are hundreds of stars shining in the TYPO3 galaxy and our combined resources will make it possible.

Jointly, we will enable people to communicate!

Sincerely,

Kasper Skårhøj