There are two stories to tell about 2010's TYPO3 Conference, or T3CON10, as the true afficionado has it. One is about the conference as such.
Outgrowing all it's previous installments, it drew 478 people to Frankfurt for two days, some of which took the journey from India and the US. 61 speakers gave presentations on a wide range of topics in four tracks. After quite a few welcoming words by Jürgen Egeling, the leader of the organisation team, a keynote by Kasper Skårhøj, the inventor of TYPO3, together with Kian Gould of the marketing team had everybody plunging headfirst into "a day with TYPO3". They were showing off TYPO3-powered high-profile websites that would overcomplete most people's daily needs from booking a flight to finding the next store of Germany's largest grocery chain.
The main conference programm starting after the keynote offered four tracks, ranging from all about upcoming versions 5, called Phoenix and TYPO3 4.5 Long Term Support (or LTS),to a big choice of presentations on TYPO3-based software solutions using the CMS as a framework.
The attendees chose "the Varnish HTTP Cache" by Poul Henning Kamp, "How to improve quality of your TYPO3 extension(s)" by Mike Zaschka, Christian Trabold and finally "The Tesseract Project: display any piece of information in your web site" by François Suter and David Mendez as the winners of the best paper awards. However it is safe to assume that the many published presentations on slideshare and the upcoming videos (watch the news on typo3.org for details) on all the presentations will be a treasure-trove of TYPO3-goodness for those of you who could not make it the conference this year, or want to relive a presentation you have actually seen, or want to to see one that you missed while sitting in another track.
Apart from the actual speeches, all good conferences happen as much in the coffee breaks and evening delights as in the conference rooms. This is of course a total understatement of the very friendly atmosphere during the days and the amazing party overviewing Frankfurt from the 25th floor of the Holiday Inn Tower. You had to be there to believe that this was in fact an IT-conference, but that is nothing new to TYPO3 communards, having rocked many alpine venues in the last ten years at the annual snowboard tour (T3BOARD), the TYPO3 Developer Days (T3DD) and the conference hotel's bars and dance floors.
However, there is a second story. This conference marks a turning point for this community. I would go as far as to call it a moment of victory for one of it's biggest challenges. The centre piece was the long-awaited presentation of the current state of Phoenix, TYPO3's attempt to define the future of an enterprise Open Source CMS.
Robert (Lemke) took the audience literally by storm and gave everybody an idea how mind-bogglingly complex the task has been to craft the architecture, that he and the very impressive array of team-members have worked on in the last two years. About one-third into his presentation it hit me like a hammer: this is the moment where it all comes together!
Years ago the idea was born to create a new TYPO3 system from scratch, not to solve problems the old one had, but to carry the head start TYPO3 had over other alternatives (and still has, if you ask me) into the next 10 years. Money was to be collected to fund this long-term effort by the Association's members and also the conferences, which have always been a major factor (and this one will be the biggest contributor yet).
Almost three years of conceptual and programming work was invested with Robert (Lemke) at the helm of the project together with Karsten (Dambekalns). And now at T3CON10 Robert had one after the other from the 5.0 (or "gimme five") Team on stage, to offer insights into what they were actually doing, but also to display and share their very tangible passion for what it is they are creating. Years of work, of not giving up, of programming and refactoring basics that would do nothing visible were drawing to a close, as the 5.0 team showed the first, still very basic, but working version of Phoenix.
It has to be mentioned that the team working on version 4.5 were showing an equally strong performance and reinforced TYPO3's ongoing claim to delivering THE state-of-the-art Open Source CMS. Be sure to watch their presentation on video once it becomes available!
The spark from the keynote, the 5.0, the 4.x and several other high-performance Teams did jump over to the audience, many of them long-time TYPO3-supporters, but also many new faces. That celebration of creative power on the stage was there in most of the presentations and left everyone I talked to motivated and confident to say the least. Or "inspired to share" as the twitter stream on #t3con10 illustrates.
I went home on Saturday thinking that this must have been one of the strongest community meetings yet. I can't wait to be part of it again at upcoming T3BOARDs, T3DDs and next years T3CON. Hope to see you there!
Pictures by Daniel Lienert