This Week in TYPO3 (Week 40, 2013)

Week Ending: October 4, 2013

Will TYPO3 Neos be competitive from day one?

There was quite some lively feedback on Rasmus’s <link http: typo3.org news article will-typo3-neos-be-competitive-from-day-one>article on typo3.org about TYPO3 Neos. Rasmus mentions“.... [Neos] it is now being utilized on real, advanced projects for real clients it is also already being competitive. Check out the whole thread which contains some interesting views on the project.

TYPO3 CMS

The Alpha 3 version of TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS was released this week and contains a plethora of new and updated features. Some 200 issues were fixed and an almost equal amount of bugfixes were applied of which many were backported to older releases. A quick roundup: A new backend documentation module was created, the install tool received a lot of usability love and awesome new features, distribution management has been added to the extension manager that will allow others to provide their own "Distributions" through the TYPO3 Extension Repository in near future. User eXperience and usability received some extra attention and our Share font shows up more prominent in the backend. Ernesto Baschny, release manager of TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS,  gives a very detailed overview of all changes in Alpha 3 in his <link http: typo3.org news article typo3-cms-62-lts-alpha3-released>article on typo3.org.

TYPO3camps

There are two TYPO3camps upcoming in Germany. <link http: www.typo3camp-regensburg.de>TYPO3camp Regensburg from October 25 - 27 still has tickets, so you might hurry to get one before it is sold out. <link http: www.typo3camp-rheinruhr.de>TYPO3camp Rhein Ruhr in Essen from November 8 - 11 is sold out and they already have a waiting list. There are two international community events coming up. <link http: typo3camp.pl en>TYPO3camp Poland on October 18 and 19 in Pozna? and TYPO3 Eastern Europe - <link http: www.t3ee.org>T3EE in Cluj Napoca, Romania. Check those out and come over to support these new initiatives.

The Snowboard Tour

Registration for the epic TYPO3 Snowboard Tour 2014 will <link http: typo3.org news article t3board14-registration-starts-on-monday-october-7th-2013-1500-cest>start this coming Monday, October 7. T3BOARD14 will be a very special edition since the first part of the week will take place at the Mountain Hostel and the second part of the week in the legendary Riders Palace down in the Village and Party-Zone.

European TYPO3 Conference

Keynote speakers for the coming <link http: t3con13de.typo3.org>TYPO3 conference are determined. Leslie Hawthorn for Community, Vitaly Friedman (Smashing Magazine) for Future and Moritz Koch for the Business Day. You have until October 15 to buy your tickets for the normal price. After that prices go up. Check out the conference website and <link http: shop.typo3.org t3con13-stg typo3-conference-2013-tickets>get your tickets.

Codesprints

This week saw huge Neos code sprint in Frankfurt hosted and largely sponsored by <link http: www.de-cix.net>DE-CIX.  Thanks go out to <link http: dkd.de>dkd for sponsoring the beer and Club Mate. The 24 participants (23 guys and one girl) come from 7 countries. Most notably Jacob Floyd, from the little tiny town Buena Vista, Virginia, joined the sprint. I asked Sebastian Kurfürst, release manager of Neos 1.0,  about his involvement in the Neos project and this sprint. Sebastian Kurfürst is a member of the TYPO3 community for a long time already. I have been working together with him since he was 15 years, which was roughly ten years ago. Sebastian is the release manager of Neos 1.0, and I met him at the Neos Code Sprint at DE-CIX in Frankfurt. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your current occupation? I am Sebastian Kurfürst, 25 years old, living together with my girlfriend in Görlitz near Dresden in Germany. In my day job, I am working at my own company, <link http: sandstorm-media.de>sandstorm|media. We are currently three people doing web applications from start to finish, including the concepts, user interface, implementation and maintenance. Furthermore, we do consulting and trainings for TYPO3 Flow, Neos and web application architecture in general. Currently, we're mostly building Ember and Flow-based applications, but we are experienced in a wide variety of languages. In the TYPO3 universe, I have been part of the Flow and Neos movement since the very beginning. My first big contribution to Neos and Flow was the template engine Fluid, which I implemented together with Bastian Waidelich. After that, I spent some time bringing Flow concepts to TYPO3 CMS, building Extbase together with Jochen Rau. In recent years, I have mainly been working on the whole rendering infrastructure in Neos, with TypoScript and the like, and of course on the Neos editing interface. When I have some time to spare, I'm going climbing, doing other sports and I like photography. What is the goal of this sprint? Currently, we're working very intensely to implement and integrate the last features scheduled for TYPO3 Neos 1.0 Beta 1. While this includes quite some new features and user interface improvements, smoothing the rough edges for new users, fixing bugs and writing documentation is equally important. We want to make sure that when we release Beta 1, everybody will have a smooth experience, and that obviously is not only determined by the feature list. Talking about Beta 1: We're currently planning to have another Alpha release before <link http: t3con13de.typo3.org>T3CON13DE, so that everybody can try out the newest features, and then we expect to have a Beta version shortly thereafter. What people make up the Neos leadership team? There is no such thing like a "Leadership Team" for Neos. All in all, all the team members are really self-organizing: Everybody sees the work which needs to be done, grabs a part of that, and does his best on the topic. While this might sound like great chaos, it works very well in practice. Of course, there are some people in the team who try to focus on the big picture, also doing some coordination work: Generally, Aske, Robert and myself are trying to make sure everything which is created for the project "fits" together and fits to our vision. However, this is mostly an organizational task, as we flesh out our ideas for the future in the whole team. Generally, the team as a whole is very welcoming to new people, there are great discussions which we all appreciate and learn from. Furthermore, I fully trust every team member to do the "right" decisions, which gives a great peace of mind. It's a lot of fun to be in this team! Because we want to grow our team, welcoming new people, we will work in the coming weeks and months to make our values and processes more transparent. That should make it easier for newcomers to decide whether they'd like to be part of it, and it is a common, shared ground among all of the team members. There is a lot of excitement surrounding Neos. How does the future of Neos look like according to you? It's extremely cool to see the reactions of people when they get in touch with Neos for the first time: The possibility to focus on the content just as it is displayed on the website, without any abstractions, is extremely powerful and allows for a direct connection between the user and the website. I'm looking forward to the Beta-phase and the 1.0 Final, as I hope that more and more people are checking out Neos and see how it helps to create great experiences. I personally think that we can still push the in-page editing a lot further, allowing for multi-device previews, targeted content, and more use-cases. Rasmus, who is focussing on the User Experience, is thinking a great deal about the features after 1.0, and it's great to have him part of the team. I highly suggest to read <link http: rasmusskjoldan.com>Rasmus’s blog, which contains a lot of ideas and concepts on how we envision the future. ….and that is it for ‘This Week in TYPO3’. The TYPO3 community wants to know what you are up to! Let us know in the comments what you think and if I forgot to mention you.