The TYPO3 world is evolving. Rapidly. 15 years after Kasper Skaarhoj typed the first line of code for our most beloved content management system TYPO3, we - the TYPO3 community - have so many ways of connecting and sharing. Different ways to share by coding with TypoScript, Fluid, Extbase and FLOW3, through the TYPO3 Association that keeps hold of the brand and fosters the product development and through events like T3BOARD, our world-wide conferences T3CON and community-organized bar-camps.
From 2006 on, when Robert Lemke and Karsten Dambelkans started the new era of coding for TYPO3, we were anticipating the next generation of TYPO3, which will finally arrive as a first alpha for the TYPO3 Conference in Stuttgart.
However, since 2006 a lot of things have changed: We now have way more than that:
- FLOW3, a powerful PHP framework not only for CMSes
- Fluid - which is a great templating engine that fits so many needs
- and our TYPO3 CMS, which we just about to release version 6, after we recognized that the "new kid on the block", formerly known as TYPO3 5.0 will come as a separate product.
Some community members and the TYPO3 marketing team, responsible for the brand, came up with a new way to fit the requirements we have today in terms of naming - because we now have clearly more than one single CMS in our TYPO3 universe. The team thought about dealing with the TYPO3 brand in a better way for communication and marketing strategies, which also leaves room for new products that may arise during the next years out of the TYPO3 community.
The result is TYPO3 as a so-called "umbrella" brand. TYPO3 is a strong brand, and the TYPO3 community is proud of it. So, the name "TYPO3" should be part of all our products that will be released in the near future. Well, we thought of a similar idea with "FLOW3" three years ago, keeping the upper-case four-letter-word and the "3" in the name, but we now have Fluid and Extbase, and frankly, it limits us in a way to come up with good names. The umbrella brand gives more freedom to that by attaching "TYPO3" to our products, but also make it possible to state the product name it.
This leads to
- FLOW3 is now called "TYPO3 Flow"
- TYPO3 (the CMS, v4/v6) is now called "TYPO3 CMS"
- Fluid is now called "TYPO3 Fluid"
- the new CMS will be called "TYPO3 New-Kid-On-The-Block" (you know what I mean, once the name is finalized - you can be sure that "New-Kid-On-The-Block" will not be the name
So, this is what the team came up with, and really - we thought about so many issues and possibilities here, and would love to get everybodies' opinion on this topic – please post your comments here.
We collected all the background information in a an interesting history page that shows how we got to this point. It can be found here: typo3.org/the-brand/a-brand-new-way/
One personal side-note: This discussion happened some weeks ago and it was my task (Benni Mack) to finalize the documents and news-articles, but couldn't come up with it in time - I apologize for that.