Community 2011 - 2012

As the year draws to an end I'd like to present you with a short personal review of 2011, just before we dive into the new year. 2012 is going to be an exciting year for TYPO3. We will see a lots of accessiblity improvements in new releases of TYPO3. TYPO3 version 4.7 is slated for April 24 of 2012. The File Abstraction Layer, for instance, will be a new feature of TYPO3, enabling connection to cloud services. Our newborn FLOW3 will see increased adoption in the PHP Framework world and based on FLOW3 our yet to be named next-generation CMS 'Phoenix' will see the light of day with a first version. Last but not least the new typo3.org will be released in the beginning of 2012, sparking off new marketing initiative. Our community is an awesome development platform, but just being superduper developers is not a unique selling-point anymore. 2012 will be a year of marketing.
Communication in the community has improved quite a lot this past year. Having regular online meetings, using for instance our conference server Big Blue Button, set a new standard. Besides the already very active teams we have seen awesome new work from the Design Team, the Documentation Team and the Server Infrastructure Team. I am pleased to announce that the Screencast Team is working on it's first try-outs for new series of screencasts that will definitely be useful for newcomers and experienced users alike. I am also excited to announce the Editorial Team with a lot native english speakers.
This past year we had two releases of the current TYPO3 branch, of which one was a Long Term Support release, with guaranteed maintenance for over three years. The LTS was widely received as a sign of reliability. We had the release of our PHP framework FLOW3, which had a lot of exposure in the press. Now this basis is ready the team is working on the new next-generation CMS code named Phoenix. In 2011 we have seen numerous national initiatives for events like the Barcamps in Germany, TYPO3 University in France, the TYPO3 Congress in the Netherlands and T3CAMP Italy. I have been in contact with folks from Romania, Iran and Uzbekistan that want to start or have started local initiatives. 
International events, like Fossdem, CMSexpo, CeBIT and Linuxtag will have a TYPO3 presence again and of course there is the North American conference in Quebec and hopefully an Asian TYPO3 conference. At CeBIT 2012 TYPO3 will be more visible then ever thanks to one of our caring and supporting sponsors. I sincerely want to thank all involved in the TYPO3 community for your cooperation and dedication and of course Kasper for giving us TYPO3. With all the experience we already have as a community for all these years I am confident that we will be able to kick up TYPO3 in the Open Source CMS world a notch in 2012. Happy New Year to all of you and your families and be safe!
gRTz ben (community manager)