Postcards from TechSummer 2020

By Jürgen Egeling of Punkt.de

Jürgen’s article (in German, English with Google Translate) includes highlights from the talks about what’s new in TYPO3 v10, new initiatives like TYPO3 Metrics, and topics like Redis and living style guides. 

“Since it wasn't possible for the TYPO3 community to meet personally due to the current situation, Techsummer took place on July 31st. online.”

By Elli Ludwigson of DDEV

Check out Elli’s write-up notes from T3oce. 

“Since March, I’ve had a chance to see quite a range of solutions to taking an event completely virtual. For T3oce, there was a livestream on YouTube, a simultaneous chat hosted on Mattermost, and follow-up group video conversations on Jitsi. The organizers did a good job managing all those spaces, and I respect the community’s commitment to using open source solutions wherever possible.”

By Paul Hansen

The TeaTime sessions kicked off with Christoph Zimmermann and Daniel Lienert's talk on using Redis in Large TYPO3 Environments. Redis is very fast because it keeps the database completely in RAM. Developers looking to boost speed by deploying Redis should be mindful of appropriate use cases. A complete write-up is available in German (English with Google Translate).

Next up, Simon Praetorius presented his Living Styleguide tool to speed up the development cycle between designers and developers in a “hot-potato process.” Simon began with a quick overview of Fluid Components, which are small encapsulated building blocks used for rapid application development. The Styleguide extension is then used to create an interactive "kitchen sink" so that developers can ensure that every component in a project works correctly and consistently. The Styleguide can even go to clients for approval before production. Check out Simon's presentation and the live Fluid Styleguide demo on the Fluid Components website.

Michael Telgkamp, Team Lead of the Accessibility Initiative, then detailed the challenging process of making TYPO3's Pagetree accessible during a TYPO3 version 10 code sprint. You might think the Pagetree is a nested list of links, but it is actually implemented as a non-hierarchical SVG so it can progressively render large pagetrees. With the help of other coders at the sprint, Michael added ARIA attributes and JavaScript handlers to make the Pagetree component fully keyboard-navigable. This is another great reason to upgrade your website to TYPO3 version 10!

Finally, Benni Mack, Project Lead for TYPO3's core development team, led the crowd through a rousing presentation called “TYPO3 vs. Change.” Benni admitted that recent TYPO3 development has been more “developer-driven” than “customer-led.” There are millions of people using TYPO3 as an editor while relatively few are enjoying TYPO3's flexible features for developers, like Extbase and Fluid. Benni pledged that features and UX improvements for editors would be a focus of the version 11 release cycle. Thus, the “change” in the keynote's title refers to an end of the refactoring era and the beginning of a new phase to make TYPO3 version 11—and beyond—“the CMS for everyone.” TYPO3 is already loaded with some very advanced features like workspaces and publication dates. Now is the time to turn our attention to bugfixes, default output after installation, editor UX, and innovation through accessibility. Take a look at Benni's slides.

An event like this would normally happen in person, but by running the event online, it was able to attract a wider audience. In addition to the lack of travel expenses, the event itself was free! The BigBlueButton instance hosted by punkt.de was easy to join and worked smoothly throughout the event. Many thanks to everyone who made this event possible.