This year’s Snowboard Tour was held in Fiesch, Kanton Wallis, Switzerland from
January 29th to February 4th, 2006. 134 participants, including externals, populated the
slopes and took part in various activities ranging from football and
ice hockey tournaments to heavy bandwidth consumption and CPU load in
the nerding area. Special thanks for a great week in the snow goes to the T3BOARD06-Event-Team: Adrian Zimmermann (www.snowflake.ch), Michael Hirdes (www.elios.de) and Mathias Schreiber (www.wmdb.ch). Next year’s tour is already being planned by the
event committee and the quest for a suitable location is on.

The
second international TYPO3 Conference 2006 T3CON (formerly known as
TYCON3) will take place in Karlsruhe from October 3rd to 8th. Questions
regarding these events should be posted to the event committee’s
mailing list at t3a-events@lists.association.typo3.org

Over
the last few months, many people have been working intensely on the
next major release, TYPO3 4.0. Most of the sub-projects are relatively
stable already and the respective maintainers are fixing bugs they have
detected during the currently running beta phase. Two final
features are about to be committed to the TYPO3 core: One is the new
default skin reflecting our brand new corporate design and the other is
a modified extension manager which enables connection to the new
extension repository. At this moment Karsten Dambekalns is fighting the
remaining bugs in the PHP4 SOAP implementation and, as soon as this
battle is won, Michael Stucki will release TYPO3 4.0beta3.

The
improved extension repository provides a highly important feature
to the TYPO3 community: Security reviewed extensions. An extension
uploaded to TER2 will only be added to the official repository after a
quick security check done by members of the security team. Although you
can still access non-reviewed extensions (if you dare), you can now
rely on the fact that at least two experienced developers have browsed
the code of an extension for security relevant issues. This is no
guarantee for 100% secure extensions, but still a big step forward
towards a collection of high quality extensions.

The
final version of TYPO3 4.0 depends on the new functions provided by the
TER2. Before we can launch the new repository, the security team has to
review at least 1/4 of the most popular stable and beta extensions.
Therefore, the release date of 4.0 final mainly depends on these
reviews. Honest help, be it financial, work or organisation, is highly
appreciated. Please address your offers and questions directly to the
security team (http://typo3.org/teams/security) or to Michael Hirdes
(dodger@typo3.org).

Questions regarding the R&D committee should be
directed to Robert Lemke (robert@typo3.org).

Aside from
the technical development, TYPO3 is also evolving in terms of corporate
identity and brand communication. The new CI consists of a redesigned logo, a
TYPO3-own font to match and various applications, including all
official websites. On behalf of the TYPO3 Community, we wish to thank
the design team. Especially Ralph Du Carrois
(www.seite4.com) for designing the logo and our own typeface, Steffi
Kieffer and Ben O’Hear (www. revelate.com) for the web designs and
Rasmus Skjoldan (www. bee3.com) for managing and communicating the
process. Credits for template and CSS programming go to Sebastian
Lechenbauer (www.dpool.net) and Robert Lemke (www.robertlemke.de).

With
this milestone reached, the T3BRAND project has come to a successful
end. The branding effort will now be transferred into a management and
evaluation process to be defined by the communication committee. The
logo and logo guide, the style guide and the font are now available
here under the provisions of a creative commons license
(http://typo3.org/teams/design/ci-flightplan/). Questions about the
logo and its usage should be addressed to Rasmus Skjoldan
(raz@bee3.com).

The first
general assembly of the TYPO3 association takes place on March 2nd,
2006 in Copenhagen. The meeting will commence at 13:00 at the IT
University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, DK-2300 Copenhagen S.
The room number will be announced on the association website. For those
planning to attend, the T3A-Site also contains the agenda and a registration form, so we can book a large enough room.