Two new websites and a new brand for the TYPO3 family - that's our personal Super Friday!
Half a year after announcing our plans to release the framework for TYPO3 5.0 as an independent package, we are now very happy to reveal its own brand: FLOW3.
While it became quite clear during the development of TYPO3 5.0 that we can't resort to existing solutions we started creating our own application framework in November 2006. A big distance has been traveled since then and while talking with other PHP developers in forums and on conferences we realized that many of them had the same requirements for a framework like we had in mind.
We discovered more and more reasons which were in favor of not only creating a dedicated package, but also giving it its own name and identity. We'd like to attract other PHP developers, who are not yet part of the TYPO3 community and who are seeking for a modern foundation to build PHP applications. We'll have the opportunity to show them that we have big plans for TYPO3 5.0. And of course we have the profound wish to share our work with the whole PHP community.
During the last two months, a bunch of volunteers worked hard on a daughter brand "FLOW3" which expresses it's independence as well as its belonging to the TYPO3 family. And not only that. We also created a great new website which explains the concepts of FLOW3 and thus the basis of TYPO3 5.0.
I'm very happy to announce the launch of flow3.typo3.org today and I'd like to thank all those who contributed in dark evenings and endless nightshifts. Among them were: Karsten Dambekalns, Jürgen Egeling, Martin Herr, Daniel Hinderink, Christian Jul Jensen, Sebastian Kurfürst, Rasmus Skjoldan, Søren Vedel and Wolfgang Zenker.
One more thing ...
For the coordination of the TYPO3 5.0 development efforts, we used to run a Trac installation which hosted our issue tracker, code browser and a wiki. But we were really missing some important features (like being able to set up sub projects) and were looking for alternatives. Fortunately, Martin Herr came across a tool called "Redmine" which looked very promising.
So we created a new website - the TYPO3 Forge. Its purpose is to centralize TYPO3's development projects and provide a home for teams who are in need of an issue tracker, code browser and subversion. Although forge.typo3.org currently accommodates only TYPO3 5.0 and FLOW3 related projects, we structured it open enough to be ready for the TYPO3 v4 team and other projects.
We created some neat features for TYPO3 Forge: It supports Single Sign-On from the beginning (just use your typo3.org account) and we'll bit by bit enable some nice custom modules which we created for Redmine.
Yet one more thing ...
We also needed a new subversion server. So we created one: svn.typo3.org. Together with Michael Stucki and Ingmar Schlecht we designed a directory structure which allows for migrating the TYPO3 v4 core from SourceForge in case we are in need of that. But for now, you'll just find the TYPO3 5.0 and FLOW3 source in it. And - did I mention that users and passwords of svn.typo3.org are synchronized with typo3.org?
Go with the flow!
Celebrate with us, ask your questions, have a nice coffee! You find most of us today in the IRC channel #flow3-launch at irc.freenode.org
