TYPO3 at OSCON 2011

Categories: Community Created by Zach Davis

For the past three years, TYPO3 has maintained a strong presence at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). In late July, OSCON 2011 was held in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

For the past three years, TYPO3 has maintained a strong presence at the annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). In late July, <link http: oscon.com _blank>OSCON 2011 was held in beautiful Portland, Oregon, and the TYPO3 booth was staffed by Zach Davis and Lucas Thurston from <link http: castironcoding.com _blank>Cast Iron Coding in Portland and Seth Conley from <link http: aoemedia.com _blank moz-txt-link-rfc2396e>AOE Media's San Francisco office. As in the past, OSCON was very much focused on current and cutting edge trends in the open source community. Many of the attendees expressed interest in mobile and cloud technologies, and visitors to the booth were keenly interested in TYPO3's mobile capabilities.

It is always a pleasure to be at OSCON because of the other interesting projects that are represented there, and this year was no exception. The Apache Foundation and phpBB were our neighbors at the TYPO3 booth, and we enjoyed discussing those projects with the booth staffers. Make Magazine manned a booth across from us and we spent our downtime at the conference learning about the <link http: www.arduino.cc _blank>Arduino platform and brainstorming DIY geek electronics projects. TYPO3 was in good CMS company as well, as both Drupal and Joomla were present at the conference.

As always, attendees showed a good deal of interest in TYPO3, and they were eager to learn about how TYPO3 distinguishes itself from other open source content management systems, especially Drupal and Wordpress. We had a number of interesting discussions with end-users and developers about their experiences with open source and proprietary content management systems in general, making it clear that improving usability and user experience were at the forefront of man users' minds. As developers, it is easy to lose sight of how important the content editing interface is for users, and OSCON provides us with a good reminder that the user experience should always come first as we think about how to improve TYPO3. That said, visitors who took a few moments to take a look at the TYPO3 backend were impressed with the interface and functionality that we showed them, and many expressed eagerness to try out the TYPO3 introduction package. Over the course of the three days, we were able to introduce TYPO3 to developers, IT decision makers, and end-users, and also learn quite a bit about other open source CMS solutions.

We're looking forward to OSCON 2012, and are continuing to discuss how we can position TYPO3 in the US, as well as how we can better communicate TYPO3's numerous strengths. We'd love to hear what you think in the comments, below!