T3CON11 – a Brief Recap

Categories: Community Created by Sacha Storz and Patrick Lobacher

The seventh international TYPO3 conference just wound up, and as expected, T3CON11 was a blast. Over 370 visitors from thirteen countries came together in Frankfurt, Germany to hear about, learn about, discuss TYPO3, chat, make new acquaintances – and of course party hard at T3CON's famous come-together-event.

Disclaimer: The authors were obviously unable to attend all the presentations, there was just too much interesting stuff going on. The selections below is thus subjective and in no way a general statement on quality or importance.

FLOW3 Final Release: Oct 20th 2011

One of the most prominent topics was the development of FLOW3 and TYPO3 5.0, codename Phoenix, and in a joyful surprise, Robert Lemke, lead developer of the FLOW3 and Phoenix team announced the stable 1.0 release of FLOW3 in his keynote. On October 20th the PHP framework that will give birth to TYPO3 5.0 will enter stable status 1.0!

What's happened in the last couple of months? In 2011 the team incorporated Doctrine 2 into the framework to handle persistence and also worked on the whole ecosystem surrounding the developmental process (deployment, CI, etc.). And – a move controversially discussed – they ditched Ext JS for Phoenix in favor of SproutCore 2 and jQuery instead. Because of these changes, and the refactoring in FLOW3 development, development progress had slowed down a bit over the year, but Robert assured the audience that these decisions have resulted in a more stable and flexible software package that will enable developers to produce great web applications. Robert's core message was that FLOW3 is a web application platform offering modern technologies and approaches like dependency injection, AOP (aspect oriented programming), and DDD (domain driven design). This PHP framework is different from others, as it provides an overarching process for writing good software rather than being just another library of components that must be used separately.

Sebastian Kurfürst offered some interesting additional information about the possibilities of FLOW3 in his talk<link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper flow3_goes_semantic.html _blank>FLOW3 Goes Semantic. His work is based on research for his diploma thesis. He incorporated technologies into the framework that empowers editors to enrich data with semantic annotations, allowing websites built with FLOW3 to integrate with the global semantic web of linked data. As a side note, it was great to learn that people are already working with FLOW3 in real world projects (as <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper service_oriented_enterprise_application_with_flow3.html _blank>Christopher Hlubek as well as <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper flow3___typo3_phoenix__a_real_world_debut.html _blank>Clemens Kalb and Andreas Förthner showed).

Budget Presentation

One important change within the TYPO3 Association proceedings may have gone unnoticed for many conference attendees. This year, for the first time, the four most important budgets within the TYPO3 project were presented to the public, allowing everyone to discuss and ask questions about details and the decision-making process. Everyone had the opportunity to see the budgets for the Community Manager, TYPO3 Version 5, TYPO3 Version 4, and the Certification Program. This presentation revealed a series of fundamental changes in the TYPO3 Association's structure and conduct. Berit Jensen and Peter Pröll made the presentation in their presentation <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper getting_involved_with_typo3.html _blank>Getting Involved with TYPO3. If you are not yet familiar with these developments it might be worth watching the videos (see below).

TYPO3 – The Brand

An interesting presentation was given by Rasmus Skjoldan. He talked about the process of developing a <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper typo3_brand_book_presentation.html _blank>Brand for TYPO3 as a project and as a product. Using archetypal branding, he and the marketing team want to give TYPO3 a lasting, stable identity, a brand personality that appeals both to the mind, heart, and soul of both developers and users. Choosing from a broad range of branding archetypes "The Caregiver“ was chosen, something we can surely all relate to. The team is now working on story lines and plans to release a brand book providing examples, imagery, and text material for future communication and public relations.

Awards! Videos! And Pictures Too!

Speaking of interesting presentations, we must mention the Best Paper Awards. Conference visitors were encouraged to rate the quality of each presentation. The three winners were: Berit Jensen with <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper save_time_by_using_sass.html _blank>Saving Time by Using SASS, Soren Schaffstein with <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper why_cucumber_s__make_your_typo3_project_better.html _blank>Why Cucumbers Make Your TYPO3 Project Better and the top award went to David Zülke's presentation on <link http: t3con11-frankfurt.typo3.org sessions acceptedpapers paper designing_http_interfaces_and_restful_web_services.html _blank>Designing HTTP Interfaces and RESTful Web Services. Congrats once again!

All of the presentations are online, so if you missed something or were not able to attend, you can find the recorded sessions on <link http: t3con11.chaoscdn.de _blank>chaoscdn. You will also find a wide variety of media, slides, and pictures on Slideshare, <link http: lanyrd.com t3con11 _blank>Lanyrd and <link http: www.flickr.com search _blank>Flickr (visit<link http: typo3blogger.de session-videos-von-der-typo3-conference-2011-t3con11-sind-schon-online _blank>typo3blogger's comprehensive list). The photo sessions initiated by the Reverend may have produced some fun results and will be online soon, so you may find it entertaining to browse through the conference image stream, even if you did not attend.

T3CON12 is Round the Corner – in Canada and Europe

T3CON11 was a great conference, thanks again to everyone involved. Our thanks to the speakers, the organizers, the staff, helping hands, and all the sponsors (without whom none of this would have been possible!). The location was truly lovely, the catering was superb and – it may seem nerdy to mention this but – we had the best conference WIFI most of us ever experienced.

So what's next? From June 13-15, 2012 we will hold the conference in Quebec, Canada with two English and one French tracks. The event is being organized by Patrick Gaumond. Of course, later in 2012 we'll also have a T3CON in good old Europe. It will be exciting to see what transpires between now and then. We look forward to seeing all of you there (or as Jeff Segars would say, "Seeing all y'all!").

 

Design FLOW3 rocket by <link http: www.mit-ueberblick.de _blank>www.mit-ueberblick.de
Conference pics by Daniel Lienert
Proof reading by Bill Tenny-Brittian
Sacha Storz and Patrick Lobacher are part of the new TYPO3 editorial team that will take care of content on our websites. Mail <link http: news.typo3.org news article t3con11-a-brief-recap>info(at)typo3.org if you have editorial skills and want to join.