Well that’s of course not what you would expect from the TYPO3 Association [1] so please let us shine some more light into the matters of importance for T3 development and community efforts.

The team for rebuilding typo3.org [2] has been established in march 2007. The current layout and usability of typo3.org does not meet current standards anymore. Rebuilding typo3.org intend to create an improved appearance and variations for existing and upcoming subsites of typo3.org fostering usability and clearness. Also the content of typo3.com will be integrated into the new home of TYPO3, which will make an end to the era of separated sites for developers and the general public.

Two focal points for the developers part of the portal are documentation and the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER). Since the start, two meetings have been held in Düsseldorf, Germany. Tasks have been allocated to people, but the team started off without a real deadline. But now the work is starting to make good progress, they are working on a roadmap with milestones and a target date for the relaunch of the website.

An extensive design proposal for the new typo3.org as well as proposals for browsing TER and for team pages are ready and under discussion in the team. The team pages strive for the goal to get more commitment into TYPO3.

While the project is on its way, actual work has been done on the
current homepage of typo3.org by adding a contact page for quick access
to information about TYPO3 and the central information point. The homepage also had some small cosmetic improvements and there has also been a redesign of the news feeds as they appear on the homepage. The feeds are now displayed in separate categories.

It’s work in progress on this front too. The Certification Team is now finishing their website, which will be a subdomain of typo3.org. In the future the site will be the central point of information and for registering certifications and all related stuff. Programming on the extension goes on and questions for the exams are created. At the coming months there will be going on more of these activities.

The conference was sold out and really came up to the expectations one would expect from the largest international TYPO3 event. According to many attendees the quality of talks and the professionalism of those who attended was plainly unrivalled by the first two editions. Also the atmosphere during the conference was so great that it made some of the old community members have déjà-vus of the first snowboard tours, when the basis was formed of what now has become one of the most successful open source communities. Technical excellence and the will to improve the project still goes hand in hand with an extended family feeling. The talks were all of high quality and the excellent talk of Lars Houmark about extension hacking (which made some people a little bit nervous) was voted best of the conference. It gave a sharp example of the kind of issues the TYPO3 Security Team has to tackle every day. Minor stain on the program was the absence of two speakers from outside the community, hope we don’t have this again next year. A big thanks goes to the guys who stepped in and filled the gap with great technical talks.

It is not sure yet if the conference will be held in Karlsruhe next year, some other cities are also in the running. We’ll keep you posted on that one.

Development of TYPO3 4.2 is making good progress. Alpha 1 has been released and Alpha 2 is just around the corner, featuring – among others – the base for the “Cleaner Backend” project. That project is about improving the usability of the Backend by making important items more visible and easier to use. Other then that, we have seen progress in Workspaces contributed by Kasper, which enables to move content elements and pages in Offline Workspaces. Other highlights include massive usability improvements for Flexforms, smaller visual improvements for the page and content element type selectors with grouping and support through icons, the addition of an anti cross site scripting library, updated prototype and script.aculo.us libraries and lots of bug fixes.

As it looks now we’ll have a third Alpha release late November before announcing ‚feature freeze‘ and moving to Beta phase which is intended for bug fixing only. The final release of TYPO3 4.2 [3] is still on track for a late January or early February release.

Meanwhile the 4.1 branch has seen another maintenance release featuring 37 bug fixes. It is recommended to update all installations to TYPO3 version 4.1.3.

Apart from the ongoing development work, the core 4.x team [4] had a little organisational improvement as well this time which turned out to be really productive: The core-development mailing list is now open for community involvement. That means everyone can submit source code changes as patches to the core team mailing list through a strict workflow defined in the core mailing list rules [5]. You can subscribe to the list by filling out the registration form [6].

The 5.0 development team has mostly pondered about architectural and organisational stuff the last weeks. One of the results is the even clearer distinction between the new framework and the CMS.
The TYPO3 Framework has been the part they put most work into in the past. It is the base for all further development around the 5.0 project [7], i.e. the CMS, the Content Repository and later on extension development. But the framework can also be used for development of standalone applications and offers an unmatched combination of possibilities and tools compared to other PHP frameworks. If you do clean coding, such standalone applications can later be integrated into the TYPO3 CMS without too much effort.

The TYPO3 CMS will be developed based on the TYPO3 Framework, the new TypoScript package and the TYPO3 Content Repository. Developers should keep in mind though, that the CMS will ship a while after the framework. Therefore it doesn’t make sense (yet) to wait for TYPO3 5.0 with new projects: standard content will be easy to migrate and code will have to be adapted in any case. Code clean and you’ll be better off when it comes to that.

We are sure the Framework as well as the CMS will be highly anticipated, this has been shown by the response of the audience at this year’s TYPO3 Conference in Karlsruhe: All presentations about 5.0 related topics were packed and conversations throughout the conference show a great deal of interest in the concepts as well as the progress.

It is very clear to us that the current two way path might inflict some arousal to both TYPO3 developers and companies. Organisations using TYPO3 in daily life will also have uncertainties about the consequences of the new architecture for upgrading, maintenance and future investments. To tackle this the Association will start informing about these kind off issues.

As a start next year with the launch of the new typo3.org, the T3A will publish a Q&A section that will tackle the most important questions about both development and migration issues, both technical and more marketing related. Later on the year we will create the first press and marketing kits. In that aspect you’re already welcome to send in your questions to us so we can start the work. Please keep in mind that we won’t send you an answer, we’ll use it for the Q&A section. Best is to keep following the news on all our websites!