Beatrice Finocchiaro
Team Changes and Growth
In 2024, the TYPO3 Documentation Team saw significant changes and new additions that brought fresh innovation and momentum to the project.
Welcomes
The team welcomed new members and strengthened its operations through key transitions:
- Garvin Hicking was appointed as the new GitHub admin, further strengthening the team's operations.
- New members Stefan Frömken, Sandra Erbel, and Jaap van Otterdijk officially joined the TYPO3 Documentation Team, bringing fresh energy and perspectives.
Farewells
In 2024, the TYPO3 Documentation Team said goodbye to several key members:
- In March, Chris Müller stepped down as co-team leader. Later, in July, he also left the team. The team expresses gratitude for his contributions and wishes him all the best for the future.
- In October, Florian Thiele, who was voted in to the co-team leader role earlier in the year, announced he would step down in January 2025. The team thanks him for his leadership and wishes him success in his future endeavors.
Activities and Achievements
The year 2024 has been a transformative one for the TYPO3 Documentation Team, marked by several significant milestones and new features that promise to further enhance the platform.
The most recent achievement: a workflow to automatically migrate from Markdown to reStructuredText. This project, developed over three months by Jaap van Otterdijk and Lina Wolf, was successfully completed in December.
Throughout the year, we worked on updating the documentation to reflect the latest changes introduced with the TYPO3 13.4 LTS release.
One major effort was the complete rewrite of the TYPO3 site package tutorial to showcase new features like site settings and templating with PAGEVIEW. Users can now generate a v13 site package via get.typo3.org/sitepackage to follow along with the tutorial.
Another noteworthy achievement was the automatic Fluid ViewHelper Reference Generation, which updates dynamically with changes to corresponding ViewHelper classes in the TYPO3 Core and the Fluid Rendering Engine.
To make TYPO3 more accessible to newcomers, the Getting Started Tutorial was updated and tested with real-world feedback from new TYPO3 users. This resource now provides an even clearer introduction to TYPO3, guiding beginners through the initial setup and helping them understand the TYPO3’s core concepts and features.
Additionally, the team rolled out a new Policy for making and reviewing documentation contributions, which includes updated PR requirements, streamlined workflows for PR and issue management, and more effective collaboration practices. These changes aim to improve overall project management and code quality and be more encouraging to fresh contributors.
We also introduced new guidelines for screenshots and created a project that can be used to create screenshots in a consistent way.
Switch to the PHP-based Rendering
We completed the process of switching from the Python/Sphinx-based rendering of the TYPO3 documentation to the new, PHP-based rendering container phpdocumentor/guides.
This shift enabled enabled several improvements to the user experience of docs.typo3.org:
- Support for CommonMark Markdown as an input format for documentation.
- Popovers for different language constructs, including automatic linking from Class mentions to the phpdocs on api.typo3.org.
- A new permalinking system now supports links like docs.typo3.org/permalink/t3start:start in Markdown and reStructuredText documents. These links can be called before rendering and remain functional within TYPO3 Core error messages, even if content or documents are moved. Rendered documentation uses relative links to ensure compatibility with search engines.
Completed Budget Ideas related to the TYPO3 Documentation
- Documentation Made Easier With Markdown
- Community Budget Idea Interim Report: Improving Documentation for New Integrators and Developers (final report not yet released)
- Documentation Search Improvements
- api.typo3.org: Replace Doxygen with phpDocumentor (achieved by Jaap van Otterdijk and Lina Wolf in their free time, despite not receiving a budget)
Looking Ahead
All of these advancements make 2024 a year of continuous growth for TYPO3 documentation, laying the groundwork for even greater innovations in the future.
As we say goodbye to 2024, a year filled with significant achievements, we embrace 2025, knowing that TYPO3 CMS will continue to grow and thrive. We look forward to seeing many more contributors to the documentation team, helping us reach new milestones in the coming year.
