Structured Content Initiative - What Happened in March?

An updated Initiative official page

The official page of our initiative has been updated and completed with these two headings: Roadmap and Code of Conduct.

The rhythm and the direction 

As promised, the Initiative members have been building a deliverables roadmap over the last few weeks. You can discover it on the Structured Content Initiative official page. It details the different deliverables, the necessary tasks and the teams and members who are responsible for them. This roadmap is supposed to evolve over time. 

At the end of February, Claus proposed to the Initiative a new "nested grids" feature for the version 10. As the feature freeze was on February 25th and the LTS release will happen on April 21st, we decided that it wouldn’t be wise to introduce this feature into the LTS release. A grid system feature, along with other deliverables, is planned and scheduled in the roadmap. 

Wherever possible for a deliverable, we will use an extension as a feature MVP, developing with UX concepts first, within a real agile process of iterations. By being compatible with TYPO3 version 10, the extension iterations will be testable by as many people as possible, and we will benefit from valuable feedback.

First results of the survey

A dedicated article will be published soon with the detailed full results of the survey, but we wanted to give you some spoilers :)

With time and perseverance, we managed to get enough answers from profiles that are not specifically developers (more than half of the respondents). This was very important to us because our initiative is responsible for features that will benefit both technical and non-technical profiles.

Our user panel is mostly older than 30 and has been working with TYPO3 for more than 5 years:

Generally, non-technical profiles are considered to take a little more time (but not much more) than technical profiles to achieve editing tasks:

Generally, non-technical profiles are considered to take a little more time (but not much more) than technical profiles to achieve editing tasks:

A few answers surprised us, because we would have bet the opposite:

You will discover a lot of very interesting information in a future article. We will be particularly careful to keep it factual, and especially not to try to correlate two statistics. If a result raises new questions, we will create other mini-surveys, very short and focused on a particular issue to complete the study.

Good practices for structured content in version 10

The new TYPO3 v10 will be released on April 21st, and some of you may be wondering today what are the best practices for integrating structured content into a new TYPO3 v10 project. That is, what are the best choices while waiting for the release of our initiative features?

The best practices are the same as before, but it is always good to recall them here:

• If you want to create content next to each other, use backend layouts (even if it might result in hundreds of backend layouts if you need a lot of flexibility) - for more information see Official Docs: Content Elements & Plugins / Backend Layout
• If you want to create content elements, use TCA, TypoScript, TsConfig, FluidTemplates - for more information see Official Docs: Content Elements & Plugins / Create Custom Content Elements
• If you are used to working with extensions like Flux, gridelements, DCE, mask + mask_export, content defender, and many others because they help you to work fast and efficiently, then don't change your habits, keep working fast and efficiently!

Next steps

Last month we planned to organize a code sprint between May and July, but the latest world events have complicated the organisation of events somewhat... We are currently thinking about implementing a remote sprint. Each group will, of course, 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. 

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash

Proofreading: Heather McNamee