Elli Ludwigson
In-person events are useful for both new or existing community members. You can meet the people you see online and create connections that support continued remote work. Attending events like TYPO3 Camp Vienna and TYPO3 Camp Mitteldeutschland has given me a head start when interacting with the community online, thanks to established relationships and shared experiences that we can build on to create great things for the TYPO3 project.
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Sessions at TYPO3 Camp Vienna
TYPO3 Camp Vienna is one of a handful of community events that are primarily conducted in English, which is a huge benefit for those who love TYPO3 but don’t speak German, including myself. I was very grateful to the presenters and attendees in Vienna who were willing and able to switch to English for myself and other non-German speakers. I appreciate the extra effort that takes, especially as my goals in attending these events include research and understanding to support a new English TYPO3 Guidebook! More on that in a minute.
Truly, the best part of an event is meeting people, and there were many of you who took some time to connect and chat. Thank you especially to the organizers from supseven, Attila János and Kathrin Schütte, who remembered me from our emails when I walked in to register on the first day.
Keynote Speech
Susi Moog gave the event a strong start with her keynote address about the power of knowing you have a community of people supporting you. We’re all in this together when it comes to figuring out hard problems, building new things, or organizing educational and contribution events. Even when we’re not together every day we can draw strength from the knowledge that others are there to work with you and share their own know-how and experience to help us all move forward and succeed.
Intro to TYPO3 Documentation
Then, Daniel Siepmann explained how to contribute to TYPO3 documentation, saying that every contribution helps and that the effort picks up steam once you’ve added your first few fixes. You can get started by clicking the “Edit me on GitHub” link on any documentation page. Daniel also showed us how to use reStructuredText (RST) in more complex documentation situations and mentioned that the documentation team can always use more dedicated support as there is a lot to do. Drop by the #typo3-documentation Slack channel with your questions and contributions.
Google Ads Integration
We had a visit from Christoph Schier of Google, who helped introduce the new Google Ads integration from TYPO3 GmbH with Stefan Schreiber. It was really neat to see this functionality in action, and major kudos to Anja Leichsenring and the team at TYPO3 GmbH for their work on building the middleware involved! This work helped to eliminate hurdles to integration and adoption and paved the way for future endeavors both for TYPO3 users and even beyond into the greater web community.
Growing your TYPO3 Skillset
Florian Weiss gave several very helpful sessions based on his work with SkillDisplay, including what’s new for editors in TYPO3 v9. The idea behind SkillDisplay is that users can follow skill paths and build on their existing skills in TYPO3. Knowledge is cumulative, and as you add one small addition at a time you’ll find yourself becoming more of an expert than you might realize. Florian also presented the “Mainzific Rim” gamification of learning TYPO3, which provides a simple context for editors especially to get started making small changes and understanding what’s available. Personally, this is on my list to try out right away, being as how there were dinosaurs and all…
I talked with Florian about how we can work together to combine the efforts of the TYPO3 education committee and SkillDisplay with my own research to build an introductory guide to TYPO3 for newcomers. Part of the joy of open source is that we can combine efforts and learning to build stronger projects with each other’s support.
TYPO3 Book Project
Finally, I presented a progress report on our TYPO3 book project! Thank you to everyone who attended and submitted comments on the draft chapter we shared. The idea behind the book is that we reach a variety of people who are new to TYPO3, be it clients, agencies, developers, editors and anyone else. We explain what TYPO3 is and what it’s good for before launching those users into existing documentation. We present good practices for how to approach development and use of TYPO3, as well as an explanatory introduction to TYPO3 without simply repeating existing materials. It’s only right that our TYPO3 book should be a somewhat open source project itself, and we’re grateful to the community for any feedback, contributions, and support we recieve.
See You Soon...
Attending TYPO3 Camps is validating, invigorating, and extremely useful for quickly expanding not just your knowledge and experience but also your connection to others who have even more knowledge and experience. Face-to-face time is critical especially for community members who work remotely and who are distributed across cities and time zones. Gathering together matches faces to names and context to conversations that we have online. We hope to see you all at an upcoming event like TYPO3 Dev Days in August!
