This Week in TYPO3 (Week 45)

Week ending November 7

TYPO3 CMS

Embrace & Innovate

Benni Mack, one of the core team leaders of the TYPO3 CMS team, published '<link http: typo3.org news article embrace-and-innovate-typo3-cms-7>Embrace and Innovate - TYPO3 CMS 7' in the beginning of this month, outlining the solid basis that has been created these past years for future development. The work on TYPO3 CMS 7  that has kicked of in high gear and some promising changes lie ahead for CMS. One of the most exciting areas being a thorough overhaul of the TYPO3 backend that has remained relatively unchanged these past years. The User Experience for editors, the every-day users of TYPO3 CMS is a focal point for the work that is being done now ending up in a release of TYPO3 CMS 7 in October of 2015. The TYPO3 CMS team is working very motivated on the upcoming features and besides the Active Contributor Meeting they recently did another code sprint and there are many more planned for 2015.   The release schedule, based on releases like is done in Linux projects like Ubuntu, has changed and the first Long Term Support release that is upcoming is CMS7 in fall of the coming year.

What does the CMS7 mean for you?

As an integrator you will be amazed by the way you can set up sites easier and quicker than ever before. As an editor or administrator you will get a lot of streamlined UI components that help you make your daily work faster and simply more fun. As an agency you can expect to have another LTS version coming up in one year with a leaner upgrade process and a lot of benefits that you can tell sell to your customers.

TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS certification

The certification team announced a new certification for TYPO3 CMS 6.2. TYPO3 CMS evolves over time of course and now include new or overhauled features like the file abstraction layer (FAL), templating with Fluid, and the newly organised install tool. After leading the team for over 8 years Dominic Brander has now passed the baton to Pascal Dürsteler. Over the years community feedback has greatly improved the quality of the certification. The '<link news article get-certified-for-typo3-cms-62-lts-now>Get certified for TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS now' article on typo3.org further more goes into certification validity and provides an outlook into the future. There is a <link http: typo3.org certification about-the-certification>large certification section on typo3.org that provides all information you need about certification and how to get certified.

Discontinuation of TYPO3 CMS 4.7 and TYPO3 CMS 6.1

The TYPO3 CMS versions 6.1 and 4.7 have <link http: typo3.org news article announcing-the-discontinuation-of-typo3-cms-47-and-typo3-cms-61>reached their end of life in October 2014. The latest versions are 4.7.20 and 6.1.12 which were released in week 43 and mark the last releases in these branches.

TYPO3 Neos

TYPO3 Neos UX lead, Rasmus Skjoldan, attended the <link http: aarhus14.jboye.com>J.Boye conference in Aarhus where he met with a broad range of people in the CMS sphere.  Lots of interesting discussions with eg. industry analysts Scott Liewehr and Marianne Kay about TYPO3 Neos –  and with content strategists such as Relly Annett-Baker, Rahel Anne Bailie and many more. A lot of attention is being paid to make sure people outside of the TYPO3 sphere hear about and are engaged in dialogue about our community and our software.

The how and why's of Florian Weiss and the TYPO3 Neos bootstrap package

Florian Weiss writes an incredible amount of <link http: buzz.typo3.org people florian-weiss>helpful BUZZ blogs called ‘Something Neos’. His latest entry ‘<link http: buzz.typo3.org people florian-weiss article let-me-see-you-bootstrapped>Let me see you bootstrapped’ caught my attention, especially because the CMS team is implementing bootstrap for the backend and we have the <link http: introduction.cms.demo.typo3.org>Introduction Package based on bootstrap as well. I asked Florian to give us a little background covering the "whys" and "whats" surrounding the Neos bootstrap package. My personal <link http: neos.typo3.org>TYPO3 NEOS journey started in one of the best and friendliest IRC channels I've ever been to - which is #typo3 on freenode.net. Having all this glorious web2.0 technology around you might consider this old fashioned, but personally I consider a channel like that perfect - for it allows to follow tech discussions and questions without begging for immediate attention. (That is if you not configured an alert when your name is typed which is possible in most IRC clients) I started to visit this channel (Nick is "FloLeBlanc" btw) when I started developing TYPO3 CMS 3.X and was overwhelmed by the friendly support and helpful people which mainly pointed me to the right documentations and provided helpful snippets when they found the time. This behaviour proved, that the TYPO3 community did not only claim to "Inspire People to Share" - but did so and still does today. Late 2013 I became more interested in the new TYPO3 NEOS and asked in said channel about it. PimBs (Pim Broens) short answer was that he couldn't give me exact details, but that he thought it would be a good idea if I blog about it on <link http: buzz.typo3.org>buzz.typo3.org. Yeah, like they'd wait for some unknown dev nobody to blog there... to my surprise they did. In addition to getting the account to blog I was pointed to a special TYPO3 NEOS channel (#typo3-neos) and relived my first experiences all over again. New system - no clue how to start - great people to guide me. Many of the core devs are in the channel and while they do of course have to dedicate most of their time to the product a bit of patience gets rewarded with great hints and first hand information. So I focused on the installation and first pitfalls of tampering with the alpha and beta versions while learning about the system. We got our hands on the first stable version in February and the release was celebrated all over the world. Having developed quite some amount of test pages I experienced that I always got the best information on how to work things out from the awesome TYPO3.NeosDemoTypo3Org package that comes with the installation. This package already used some bootstrap elements like inclusion of the core framework via a plugin and viewhelper, a menu, a carousel and column elements. A great start - but what you had to do was include (or at least keep active) the whole site package - with many elements you did not need on your own site. What I aimed for with the new Bootstrap package was to create a lightweight alternative that just reformats the existing elements by adding the according classes (e.g.: the menu) and provides new "NodeTypes" (in this case aka new "Content Element Types") an editor can easily insert after a backend login. It should help to make the first TYPO3 NEOS experience even better by not only providing a great CMS, but also giving the devs the tools to let the customers add their favourite Bootstrap elements themselves. (e.g.: A gallery wants to display a list of paintings in the form of a bootstrap media list) As mentioned above I believe that checking out the work of others is also a great way of learning to create own elements, so this package should also provide developers with a base for that, as the TYPO3.NeosDemoTypo3Org did for me. Hopefully the bootstrap package is another way to convince even more people to have a look at this great CMS, its advantages and the whole TYPO3 family in general. Inspire people to share and visit us on freenode.net! Information on how to use IRC for TYPO3 can be found on the <link http: typo3.org support irc-chat>IRC Support page.

TYPO3 Association

Budget Application 2015

The budget applications have been put online a while ago already. There have been a few discussion <link https: forge.typo3.org boards topics>here and <link https: forge.typo3.org boards topics>there. You can still comment as long as the budget are not finalised.

Miscellaneous

CMS Garden - CMS Scanner

Our friends from the <link http: www.cmsgarden.org>CMS-Garden project designed a tool to scan a local file system for installations of well known FOSS CMS systems that are part of the CMS-Garden Project. The tool currently scans for Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress. It is designed to work on Linux, OS X and FreeBSD. David Jardin of CMS Garden says about the tool: Web Hosts often have a hard time finding out which CMS are used by their customers - and therefore, it’s also hard for them, to configure their systems accordingly or to inform them about critical issues. With this scanning tool, web hosts have a powerful and easy to use tool to solve this issue. With your support we can also add TYPO3 (and Neos) to this scanner. Fork it, pull it and push it on GitHub: <link https: github.com cms-garden cmsscanner>github.com/CMS-Garden/cmsscanner

Events

TYPO3 East Europe (October 31 - November 1, Cluj-Napoca, Romania)

Daniel Homorodean main organiser of T3EE has this to report on the Eastern European conference: In the last weekend of October the European TYPO3 community gathered in the heart of Transylvania, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, at “TYPO3 East Europe”. People from 9 countries shared ideas, knowledge and the spirit of the TYPO3 community, during two days packed with prepared presentations and three social events, culminating with the main party in the Halloween night. “TYPO3 East Europe” is an event organized in Romania for the second time, aiming to bring together TYPO3 developers and agencies from the Eastern and Western Europe, create stronger ties between them, encourage the Eastern developers to be more active in the community and promoting TYPO3 in the region, where it is still little known by the web developers and by the market. In 30 October, before the main event, we had in the nice Old Casino of Cluj-Napoca a workshop for the Romanian public authorities, especially representatives of the municipalities from Transylvania and regional government. The workshop was organized by Arxia in partnership with the Cluj-Napoca City Hall and Cluj IT Cluster, which unites IT companies, universities and the administration from the region. With the participation of guest speakers from the Netherlands and Germany – Jos Kruis, ICT Manager of the Municipality of Ede and president of <link http: www.typo3gem.nl>TYPO3Gem, Hans Olthoff from <link http: www.alternet.nl>AlterNET and Jochen Weiland from <link http: www.jweiland.net>Jweiland, the Romanian public sector learned about the benefits of TYPO3 in creating a better relationship with the citizen. I believe that in order to put TYPO3 in a relevant way in a new market, working with the universities and with the public sector would bring the best results, and as we follow this plan in Romania, I hope to bring a working example that might be used further for TYPO3 to conquer the world. “TYPO3 East Europe” is already an established event and will happen for sure again, in the autumn of 2015, after the T3CON. We look forward to meet many people from the TYPO3 community, veterans and people who will join for the first time an international TYPO3 event.

Inspiring conference (March 26 - 28, Kolbermoor, Germany)

The leading, international TYPO3 FLOW and TYPO3 NEOS event of the year will take place again for the fourth time in Kolbermoor. The <link http: www.inspiring-conference.com about call-for-papers.html>Call For Papers is closed and we cannot wait to see the line-up of talks for the coming conference.   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.