Both events had their
highlights, among them another round of strategic decisions as laid out
in the budget and ample opportunities for late winter snowboarding.

The annual General Assembly is the meeting of the
active members where the budget for the new year is decided upon, based
on the applications by project leaders, lessons learned from last year
and expectations for the current year and beyond. As such it is the one
time where the financial situation is reviewed by the external
accountant and approved.

While last years budget was mainly directed at the 5.0 effort, the 4.x
development project claimed a larger share of the funds for their
purposes this year, not least to be able to tackle risks of dwindling
resources that made some goals for the 4.2 release unreachable.
Meanwhile the 5.0 development is gaining momentum, which is also
reflected by the unwavering support for this project on the budget.
Other
projects, including the security team, typo3.org relaunch and
certification have secured their budgets to continue their work. The
budget and the protocol is available to all supporting members, please
check the members mailing list archives for details.

Despite
its rather dry nature the general assembly is in the mean time also sure
to draw a small crowd of supporting members, that want to learn first
hand about the Associations decisions and plans. Our plan is to
react to this interest to create a more open space for interaction and
feedback in 2009, when the general assembly is planned to take place in
Munich, Germany on the 7th of March at a location yet to be announced
on our website [1].

TYPO3
5.0 development has concentrated for the first half on the foundation
of 5.0, which is the so-called FLOW3-framework, combining several
features that are unique in the PHP-world. As FLOW3 is advancing a
status that allows to proceed in the direction of the actual CMS
package, the requirements process and the project management strategy
is currently planned and will be tested in the next weeks and months.
Requirements will be asked for in the form of so-called user stories,
which everybody is welcome to submit. Like user stories, which are
common in agile development, the project will similarly be managed through
methods from the agile development world, like Scrum and sprints.

The
most important change in the team is that Robert Lemke and Karsten
Dambekalns will now both be working full-time on the project in a
common office in Lübeck.
More people have joined and will join the project, and
plans are in the making to allow focussed contribution for developers
wanting to come to Lübeck for a limited time to work directly with
Robert and Karsten. Watch the 5.0 project website for news.

TYPO3
4.x development culminated in the release of TYPO3 4.2. Starting at the
T3DD in May, the roadmap for Version 4.3 will be outlined and
elaborated. The development of TYPO3 4.3 is planned to be largely based on sponsored projects, for which the

core team is currently working on setting up a platform as well as policies of how project based sponsoring can be accepted. François Suter from Cobweb.ch has been appointed as sponsorship manager for the v4 development.

The cold season is probably the
hottest for the community, with the now classic
snowboard tour as its trade mark event. Still each snowboard tour has
been special through differing locations, accommodation and snow
conditions, but of course also its growing attendance and the shift
from a fun event to almost a conference in its own right and back to
the fun and sports event it has become, since T3CON and T3DD provide
the more work-related forums. That being said, the snowboard tour
hosted a bug auction and a release party of 4.2 pre-final. Also the
annual football tournament came back, but our swiss hosts could not
defend their champion’s position and had to hand over the crown to the
team of Northern Germany. Our friends at punkt.de generously sponsored a
full-featured exclusive TYPO3-backpack for the attendants. Since the
location on the mountain top offered a singular situation of both
cosiness, easy access to the slopes and enjoyable food, many
participants asked for the snowboard tour to break with its tradition
and to return to Crap son Gion in 2009. T3BOARD09 will take place from the
22nd to the 29th of March 2009, registration will open on the
Associaton’s website on October 6th 2008.

Next up are the TYPO3
Developer Days (T3DD), which will already have taken place at the time
of printing. Details can be found on the website [2]. Meanwhile the preparations for this year’s edition of the TYPO3 Conference
(T3CON) in Berlin are well underway, the events own website will be
launched in time and will be announced on typo3.org.