TYPO3 6.0 Release Timeline

During a release team meeting we decided on the dates for the alpha and beta releases and of course for the final release.

As you see on the timeline, the date of the feature freeze which will be the 14th of August together with the release of the first beta version. From then on we will have a fair amount of time to stabilize the new features and fix remainig bugs.
If you want to contribute a feature for TYPO3 6.0, make sure to be ready with coding in the beginning of August, so that there is enough time for reviewing it until the first beta.

We also decided to start early with alpha releases, to enable you to test your extensions, applications and websites with them.
The first alpha version will be released on tuesday next week. A lot of code cleanups and refactoring happend already in order to have an easier and better testable codebase. This means that quite some previously deprecated API has been removed. Therefore we recommend to already test your extensions with it.
Of course also new features made it into that alpha version, most notably the long awaited File Abstraction Layer (FAL). We think FAL works great already, but there might be some minor issues here and there.

We would love to get your feedback especailly on this but also on other features and changes, be it from a user's or a programmer's perspective.