Kicking off TYPO3 v8 Development

The main focus of the v8 development is to make the lives of TYPO3 users easier, you can expect some fancy features for editing content directly inside the website and the TYPO3 Backend. The main area on continuing making TYPO3 more robust and flexible under the hood continues as the code base will be cleaned up more and more. However, the visual UI will improve a lot by introducing new ways of solving every-day things easier for editors and integrators. One additional important focus during the TYPO3 8 development cycle will be on ease of set-up for cloud infrastructure setups.

Sprint releases

The release strategy that was followed during TYPO3 CMS 7 development turned out to be a huge success and will be kept for version 8. The roadmap towards TYPO3 CMS 8 LTS looks like this:

Version	Estimated Release	Type
TYPO3 v8.0	Mar 22nd, 2016	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8.1	May 3rd, 2016	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8.2	July 5th, 2016	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8.3	Aug 30rd, 2016	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8.4	Oct 18th, 2016	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8.5	Dec 20th, 2016	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8.6	Feb 14th, 2017	Sprint Release
TYPO3 v8 LTS	April 4th, 2017	Long Term Support Release

See the <link>full roadmap here. Each sprint release will be supported until the next version will be released. The TYPO3 8 LTS (Long Term Support) version will be released on April 4th, 2017, and will be fully supported for 1.5 years, and an additional 1.5 years for critical and security-relevant fixes. The next sprint release, v8.0, planned for March 22nd 2016, will remove all already deprecated functionality from TYPO3. Of course, there are quite some features already waiting to be included, which will tackle a lot under the hood as well as some improvements for editors inside the TYPO3 Backend.

TYPO3 v8 requires PHP7+

PHP7 is required as minimum version to run TYPO3 8. Taking on the decision, communicating and raising version requirements early in the development phase of a major version is part of our <link>release strategy. The team is aware that enforcing the still young PHP7 product line may look ambitious but we are confident this is the right decision for the following reasons: Major operating systems and distributions already offer repositories to use PHP7 in their stable versions. For Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu derivatives an upgrade can typically be done within a couple of minutes. TYPO3 instances that switch to the 8.x line early don’t face unsolvable issues. With the release of TYPO3 8 LTS in April 2017 we can expect every major distribution to provide PHP 7 in their default stable builds. Support of PHP 7.0 in TYPO3 8 LTS is granted up until the end of the TYPO3 8 LTS lifetime in April 2020. We will keep this promise, there will not be a TYPO3 8 release that breaks version compatibility. Instead, it’s likely that younger PHP versions like PHP 7.1 will be supported on top. Looking for instance at TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS, support for PHP 5.6 was officially added just recently. This took significant efforts and a time span of more than half a year to achieve compatibility in combination with the additionally promised support for PHP versions 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5. PHP7 comes with significant performance improvements, users will love the more fluent system when working with TYPO3. We do not want to cripple this by supporting an old PHP version that is roughly half as quick. Hosters will love TYPO3 8 with PHP7 for the reduced system load, too. Last but not least, this is perfectly in line with green IT efforts. PHP7 provides great language improvements that will further improve code quality and stability. The core team is looking forward to use them. We are aware that this seems a bold statement, however, as a few might notice, we went with the same approach with choosing PHP 5.5 in October 2014. Shortly after our announcement, major PHP open source projects did the same announcement. We are happy to see the huge progress we already have in TYPO3 8 and are looking for the final release, when TYPO3 will be miles ahead. For any support, questions, sponsoring, requests, feel free to contact me via <link>email or Slack.