This Week in TYPO3 (2015, Week 18)

Week ending May 3, 2015 With the <link http: typo3.org news article typo3-project-focuses-on-typo3-cms-neos-to-start-its-own-community>news on the organisational split between Neos and TYPO3 'This Week in TYPO3' will be about TYPO3 CMS only from now on. There will be a separate 'This Week in Neos' or similar at a certain point. The next 'This week in TYPO3' will also cover some of the ins and outs regarding the split.

Stand alone Fluid templating engine

The nameless coder, Claus Due, will be working during May and June on integrating a new decoupled version of Fluid into CMS, with merging expected around the end of June. That means it will be ready for the coming LTS version of TYPO3 somewhere at the end of this year. Resources will come from CMS and FluidTYPO3 budgets plus another chunk of contributed time by Claus. The initial idea for Fluid started in October 2008 during the Transition Days where Sebastian Kurfürst and Bastian Waidelich discussed first ideas. Fluid was then developed as holistic templating engine for Neos. The first backport of Fluid for Extbase happened during T3BOARD09 in Laax, so that people could get their hands on Fluid early on. After that, maintenance and new features have been added to both variants, and been tried to kept in sync. Not only Claus, but a lot of people would agree that Fluid is a superior template engine in an MVC context, but Fluid has always lived as a dependency of the Flow framework. Claus is currently creating a variant of Fluid without the Flow dependency, which can be used standalone. On top of that new APIs will be introduced which are required to restore framework-gnostic behaviors like dependency injection, form creation and link building. Based on this, Claus will coordinate the creation of slim adapters for the PHP frameworks <link https: symfony.com>Symfony 2, <link http: silex.sensiolabs.org>Silex, <link http: www.slimframework.com>SlimPHP, <link http: laravel.com>Laravel, <link http: lumen.laravel.com>Lumen and of course for <link http: flow.typo3.org>Flow. This effort will for sure boost the interest in TYPO3 from several perspectives. Claus says: "I believe this (decoupling) is the way to become inviting to the PHP community as a whole: we take our unique and good inventions and make them useful also outside TYPO3. We do so by decoupling and creating modules. And we accept that yes, probably this does mean we need to sacrifice a bit (be that features, manpower, money, compatibility, "TYPO3-ness"...)" There are definitely some challenges to be overcome with this task. Especially some public APIs have changed, to allow for reduced framework coupling and improved performance. This requires some kind of adapter for CMS and Flow, and special work is needed to enable an upgrade path for end-users. Claus will provide the adapter for Extbase, but there is still the need for an adapter for Flow/Neos. Bastian and Sebastian from the Neos Team stated: “We’re currently focussing on other Neos-tasks, but we’re very happy to support any effort to create an adapter for Flow/Neos. And when the adapter is ready, to integrate it back into the main Flow version (effectively replacing the Fluid version which is currently running in Flow).”. Some people are working with Claus on the adapters. If you want to take on a specific adapter like the Adapter to Flow please contact Claus Due (claus@phpmind.net).

TemplaVoila

It is clear there is a lot of activity on the templating front. With the advance of the above mentioned Fluid engine and initiatives like <link http: typo3.org extensions repository view gridelements>gridelements by Jo Hasenau and <link http: typo3.org extensions repository view dce>DCE by Armin Vieweg more modern approaches have come up and leave the once popular TemplaVoila on the backburner. TemplaVoila was originally conceived by Robert Lemke and Kasper as under an assignment for <link http: www.3ds.com>Dassault Systemes, one of the first enterprise users of TYPO3. Maintenance of TemplaVoila had a long history from Dmitry Dulepov, Tolleiv Nietsch to until very recently Alexander Schnitzler and Wouter Wolters. The project has been kept alive and compatible with recent TYPO3 releases until now. In an article on Github about <link https: gist.github.com alexanderschnitzler>the future of TemplaVoilà Alex lets us know that the development of TemplaVoilà has stopped. Besides the fact that the code has grown into an almost unmaintainable state with a mixture of PHP/HTML and JavaScript there are several other reasons for stopping maintenance, like lack of budget and most importantly lack of manpower. Alex also mentions the speed with which TYPO3 CMS evolves and recognises the fact that it is time to move on.

Themes

Jo Hasenau is an active TYPO3 community member, currently most known for organising the <link http: www.t3uxw.org>User Experience Week that was organised for the second time this March.  Jo has been working on several extensions as long as I know and joined forces with Kay Strobach 2 years ago to work on theming for TYPO3. Jo brings us up to speed on the history and about what is currently going on in the TYPO3 THEMES project: The current activity of the TYPO3 THEMES team is a good example, why developing Free Software is so important and why "Inspiring people to share" is not just a slogan of the TYPO3 community but a way of doing business together. And it shows that there is another thing which is crucial for the successful development of Open Source products: Active Communication! Starting with the introduction of IRRE as a diploma thesis by Oliver Hader, the first small step was the so called ICE pack by Jo Hasenau, that introduced normalised relations for nested content elements in TYPO3 for the first time. Later on this transformed into Gridelements, developed for T-Systems and then sponsored via the first crowd funding campaign for a TYPO3 extension. At the same time there were TemplaVoila and the famous Framework for TemplaVoila by Ron Hall and the team around the Web Empowered Church, which inspired Kay Strobach to create the first version of the THEMES extension. Both, Kay and Jo, had the idea of creating ready made packages with standardised output to create a rock solid base for themes in TYPO3. They have been brought together at the developer days 2013 by Ben van 't Ende, where they met Thomas Deuling, and it took just one session to have them join forces forming the current team behind THEMES. A first code sprint sponsored by the TYPO3 association involved even more people, so there is a core of about 5 people now, who are actively working on themes, gridelements and other extensions under the THEMES umbrella.   Another important step for the development of themes and distributions for TYPO3 has been made during the latest user experience weeks - T3UXW14 and 15 - where the idea behind THEMES has been picked up by developers as well as integrators. Starting with the bootstrap base package , which had been financed with a crowd funding campaign as well, there is a foundation base package now as well as several theme packages building on those two major frontend frameworks. First releases are available on Github and in the TER and the number of downloads already looks promising. The idea of themes has been picked up by other teams at T3UXW15, so currently the plan is to have a relaunch of the Government Package for TYPO3 CMS 7 LTS together with some ready made themes as well as some other distributions for certain business branches. It's true that none of the current extensions of the ecosystem around THEMES would have existed without shared code and ideas of others. So the principle of free code is essential for that kind of development. Still the major reason, why these ideas have evolved until today is, that people who created all these extensions talked about them and presented them to the public at TYPO3 conferences, Developer Days and a lot of TYPO3 camps all over the world. Additionally the team convinced the people at O'Reilly Germany to publish an official book explaining the new standard for themes in TYPO3, which is now used to collect money to buy unlimited licenses for ready made designs. The team is now doing a round trip to the different TYPO3 events this year to spread the word and involve even more people. An interesting side effect is, that there are quite a lot of women involved, although there have not been any special activities to make them join the teams. So it seems that you just have to make interesting topics more visible and start to actively communicate them to involve more people from the outside and automatically increase activity and diversity in your teams.

One-stop TYPO3 development environment.

 In a previous This Week we already mentioned Michiel Roos' homestead vagrant dev environment. Michiel lets us know that: 'Homestead now comes with <link http: mailcatcher.me>mailcatcher so you can safely test forms.   <link http: www.michielroos.com articles the-one-stop-typo3-vagrant-development-box.html>www.michielroos.com/articles/the-one-stop-typo3-vagrant-development-box.html

Developer Days 2015 (Nuremberg, July 16–19)

The 10th international TYPO3 Developer Days will be held from July 16–19, 2015 in Nürnberg, Germany. Check out the list of session proposals and add your own proposal. The T3DD15 organisation supports students and young people in apprenticeship and trainings in the TYPO3 world and works together with the <link http: t3rookies.net en>T3Rookies project and has reserved 5 free tickets including accommodation and travel costs for potential candidates. The T3rookies website has all the information needed concerning the requirements: <link http: t3rookies.net en projects typo3-developer-days>t3rookies.net/en/projects/typo3-developer-days/

TYPO3camp Berlin (June 19 - 21)

With a new <link http: www.typo3camp-berlin.de team>team and new enthusiasm Hannes Gräf and Sebastian Kreideweiß push TYPO3camp Berlin set for June 19 - 22. If everything works out there will even be some English sessions, which makes sense in a worldly city like Berlin. So don't hesitate if you are an English native speaker and register for TYPO3camp Berlin.

TYPO3 Association

After lots of excellent community news 'This Week in TYPO3' with news of the recent spike in TYPO3 Association activity with the Dialogue Days and the TYPO3 General Assembly in April. I do not need to get fully into detail here as a lot is most excellently covered in the TYPO3 Association Diary bij Naike Beggiato and other writings from within the TYPO3 Association. The general assembly of the TYPO3 Association took place in the Unperfekthaus in Essen on April 14. The GA is usually not very exciting, but this year there were a number of decisions on the agenda that brought a good number of attendants to this GA. The TYPO3 Dialogue Days 2015 also took place around the same time, from 13th to 15th of April, wrapped around the General Assembly of the TYPO3 Association. The Dialogue Days discussed topics surrounding open source communities such as values, communication, and marketing. The most important and basic topic was the discussion on values. Brainstorming about the current situation in the TYPO3 community clearly showed that the community shares a common set of values. These are: trust & respect, openness, sharing, friendship and fun as described in the article: <link http: typo3.org news article values-of-the-typo3-community-an-open-source-ecosystem>Values of the TYPO3 Community – an Open Source Ecosystem The values we hold high should be translated into action and we should remind each other of those values as also laid down in the <link http: typo3.org community code-of-conduct>Community Code of Conduct. The most important topic at the GA was the future of the TYPO3 Association that were laid down in a number of alternatives. Alain Veuve, of the board of the T3A, led the discussion about these <link http: typo3.org fileadmin t3org images fm-news t3a typo3_strategy_final_d.pdf>three alternatives. The first option is to leave things a they are. The general consensus is that something needs to happen and that a change in the TYPO3 Association and the project as such is needed. A second alternative is to keep the structure the same and get more paid people in along with that. Alain points out with the third alternative that a TYPO3 company also involves ‘paid code’ with dedicated project leaders and a number of other positions. One suggestion that is particularly appealing and pretty idealistic at the same time is to build a TYPO3 house where development takes place and is coordinated and where companies can send their developers to learn. With an overwhelming majority the GA votes for Scenario #3: «The TYPO3 Company» recently confirmed in a <link http: typo3.org news article perspective-for-the-typo3-association-change-2016>statement by Olivier Dobberkau. "We would like to inform you that we have started our work here and that we have chosen Alain Veuve as our Change Agent. He will create a team so that we can present a viable concept to the members of the TYPO3 Association at the next years General Assembly the latest." This Week in TYPO3 is brought to you by <link https: www.maxserv.com>Maxserv. Of course you can also sponsor This Week in TYPO3 and have your name mentioned here as well. Please <link>contact me by mail for more details. Check out the events calendar for a user group meeting, code sprint or other event near you: <link http: typo3.org events>typo3.org/events/. Do not hesitate to share you TYPO3 activities in 'This Week in TYPO3'. Just let me (@benvantende) know what you are up to.