Get Ready for TYPO3 v12

One of the main goals of the TYPO3 v12 series is speed. That’s right! We will step hard on the gas pedal and increase the performance compared to previous versions of our open-source enterprise content management system.

TYPO3 v12 will feature a significant productivity boost, as we aim to make the system the fastest TYPO3 version ever. We have a bunch of ideas of how to achieve this goal up our sleeves, for example:

• Improve backend usability, so backend users can manage website content with fewer clicks.
• Enable TYPO3 integrators to create custom content types quickly and easily.
• Simplify the methods for registering backend modules, allowing developers to create custom solutions more efficiently.
• Build new ways to let TYPO3 communicate with third-party systems as outgoing and incoming event notifications (webhooks and reactions).
• Improve performance by leveraging more underlying system layers, such as specialized PHP and database features (see below).

We plan to release TYPO3 version 12.0 in early October 2022. The first sprint release of the TYPO3 v12 series comes with about 100 new features for editors, integrators and developers. Further changes and improvements will be announced in every sprint release over six months until the LTS-release in April 2023.

PHP version 8.1 is a new minimum requirement to run TYPO3 v12. The PHP developers promote the latest stable version of the server-side scripting language with better performance, syntax and improved type safety. It contains many new features such as enums, read-only properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers, intersection types, performance improvements and more.

PHP version 8.1 will receive security updates for the next two years until November 2024.

Thanks to the database abstraction layer Doctrine, introduced in TYPO3 v8, TYPO3 supports a range of database servers and engines. We will update Doctrine to version 3 in TYPO3 v12, which also has an impact on the supported database engines:

• MySQL version 8.0 or higher
• MariaDB version 10.3 or higher
• PostgreSQL version 10.0 or higher
• SQLite version 3.8.3 or higher

At the same time, we will discontinue the support for the Microsoft SQL Server.

Every major TYPO3 release, for example, v10, v11 and v12, allows us to upgrade third-party dependent packages following our deprecation policy. We plan to raise the versions of the following packages in TYPO3 v12:

• Symfony version 6
• Doctrine DBAL version 3
• Composer version 2.4
• CKEditor version 5

For TYPO3 instances that use the recommended Composer-based installation method, we also plan to require at least Composer version 2.4 and TYPO3’s Composer Installers Plugin version 4.

This requirement will impact the structure of the publicly accessible folders. In previous versions, TYPO3 extensions were located in the “typo3conf/ext/” folder. Since TYPO3’s Composer Installers Plugin version 4, extensions are installed in the “vendor/” directory, the same location as every other Composer package. This change makes the “typo3conf/ext/” folder obsolete, which means it can be removed.

Five releases in less than seven months and three years of free LTS support are the hard facts of the TYPO3 v12 release cycle. When you add the release dates to your calendar, don’t be surprised that the releases are always planned on a Tuesday. We remain committed to this day of the week, as it has proven to be a solid option.

We will support each TYPO3 sprint release (v12.0 to v12.3) until the next minor version is published. The long-term support version of TYPO3 v12 (version 12.4) will receive bug fixes until 31 October 2024, and we will provide security patches for TYPO3 v12 LTS until 30 April 2026.

At the time of writing (September 2022), it may be too early for most TYPO3 projects currently in production to upgrade to the development branch of TYPO3 v12. However, TYPO3 developers should start investigating what changes are required to their code to support the new TYPO3 version.

Have you heard of Rector? Rector is a tool that can upgrade old PHP code and handle automated refactorings for you. We encourage TYPO3 extension developers to check out Rector for TYPO3, which extends the Rector project. This command line tool already contains most upgrade rules for TYPO3 v12 and helps you to prepare and migrate your extension code to the next major version. So give it a try and run Rector for TYPO3 against your code base.

Here comes another hot tip that applies to you even if you’re not a developer. You can use PHP version 8.1, which is a minimum requirement for TYPO3 v12, in TYPO3 v11 LTS (the current stable version of TYPO3) already. This also applies to the database engines that TYPO3 v12 requires.

Why not plan an upgrade of the underlying infrastructure that powers your current TYPO3 site now, so that your platform is prepared for a switch to TYPO3 v12 later?

Watch out for the upcoming sprint releases of the TYPO3 v12 series and other news at typo3.org.

Banner image by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash.