Rachel Foucard
The Structured Content Initiative is the core Strategic Initiative focused on improving the content editing user experience in TYPO3 CMS. Read our last update to learn more about what we’ve been working on.
Connect to TYPO3 Slack and join us in the #cig-structuredcontent channel.
Strategic decisions
You already know this, but it is worth repeating it again and again: this initiative is about changes in functionality that will have long-term consequences. So deciding whether to turn right or left today, even in an agile iterative process, is an important strategic decision.
A roadmap
User expectations are high, but we have to be able to bring you a concrete deliverable soon, right? So it's time to validate our assumptions, to announce them, and to build on this basis a roadmap for the next three LTS versions. What can we offer you for TYPO3 v 10, 11, and 12?
Today we have gathered enough information to build a roadmap. We’ll share it soon on the Strategic Initiative team page.
Separate data and display
One of the major challenges of creating a future-proof CMS is to be able to deliver content to any target. The prerequisite is to separate the real data from the display configuration. Whatever solutions we’ll propose to create, customize and organize your structured content, they will have to respect this goal.
That's why data handling features we develop will be approved by the Datahandling Initiative, and that's why we will do our best to help you easily migrate your existing data to our new system.
Mobile-first
We had several opportunities to confirm that "mobile-first" is not just a buzzword. When we worked during the initiative Week on mockups, or when we discussed with different end-users, and when we built the personas, this became obvious.
The team is growing
Perhaps you have been following the events of the last few days about our initiative? Perhaps not? To make a long story short, there have been some misunderstandings, explanations and good solutions.
All these interactions have in any case led to one very good piece of news. Three new members are joining our team.
- Claus: “I come from a position as maintainer of one of the two most popular nested content feature extensions, as core merger responsible for the Fluid integration, and as the head maintainer on the Fluid template engine. My ambition is to share my experience and knowledge in these areas, to ensure maximum utilisation of the Fluid template engine, potential integrations with other template engines, and practical experience in matters of content grid structures.”
- Kay: “I’m working closely with the content-block team for a while, so it was about the right time to join the initiative officially. I’m working with TYPO3 on a daily base since 2004.”
- Jonas: “I dreamt about more flexible content for a long time. This is a visionary and exciting topic. I am so happy to help it getting officially supported. I see myself as a team player and have a political mindset, but after all, I am a coder and like to get things done.
Communicate more often and better
This initiative is somewhat larger in size and duration than the others, and many have asked us to communicate more, and more often.
We have therefore decided to enrich the official initiative presentation page with other pages such as a roadmap, a members code of conduct, and any information that could be useful to the community.
We have also decided to write a monthly article on typo3.org news that will give a good summary of what happened.
For our UX work, we need user feedback, so we have published the first survey. It has been very successful, and at the time of writing, it has already received almost 200 responses. We intend to regularly solicit opinions and feedback from end-users, so we will regularly publish shorter and more focused surveys.
Also, sometimes we will need the developer community opinion to make a decision on a technical approach. We will publish the concepts to be compared at https://decisions.typo3.org.
The Structured Content Initiative Survey is open until 20 March 2020. Share our survey with your editors!
It is now time to move up a gear
We are building detailed road maps for the next few months in order to organize the different tasks and working groups. These plans will be put online in a dedicated section on our official page very soon.
We also plan to organize one codesprint between May and July, Each group will continue to work regularly with also 4 meetings per month, including one per group and one global meeting.
Here’s how to stay connected:
- Star and watch the TYPO3 Structured Content repository on GitHub to be notified of updates.
- Connect to TYPO3 Slack and join us in the #cig-structuredcontent channel.
The Structured Content Initiative Team.
Proofreading: Heather McNamee