TYPO3 at the Chicago CMS Expo

Categories: Community Created by Marc Infield

TYPO3 was an official sponsor of this years' CMS Expo. Marc, Seth and Benni showed TYPO3 to the US participants.

It was an interesting few days at the Chicago CMS Expo. We shared a lot of information about TYPO3 and it was good to see so many people walking around with TYPO3 lanyards. The conference is in its fourth year and is made up of a friendly group of about 400 people that skewed toward small businesses and municipalities with small projects. There were a handful of developers but mostly business people attending some of the sponsored tutorials.

The conference has its roots in Joomla, so Joomla was well represented on both the speaker and attendees side. In the talks there was an open source slant. For instance, Microsoft was represented and is making a serious effort to be relevant on the LAMP stack. Drupal had a good showing with an interesting keynote from Dries for Aquia discussing how open source should be learning from proprietary CMS projects.

Overall impression
Many visitors to the booth noted they’d heard of TYPO3 and had come by to learn more. This represents a huge shift in perception from OSCON in 2009, where the common comment was "TYPO3? Never heard of it.” We had a good time telling visitors about TYPO3, and everyone was receptive and impressed. We discussed features, gave some demos, then pointed people to the demo installer (great job, core team!) and the getting started documentation (great job, documentation team!).

Presentations
Benni gave a couple of scheduled presentation on the first day, both were well attended. In both he gave an overview of the history and features, and in the second he concentrated primarily on features popular in enterprise implementations: AP/Active Directory, large administrative team management through workspaces and versioning, security, stability, backwards-compatibility, extension compatibility, release cycle. Attendees were impressed and had lots of questions. Most of the people who went to the presentation later came by the booth to learn more.

Panels
TYPO3 was on three CMS evaluation panels—Business, Government, and Education—where moderators and attendees asked the panel questions on the different verticals. The panels were organized into an interesting format with general introductions by the projects followed questions put together by the moderators who quickly moved to attendee question. The moderators, Gilbanes's Scott Liewehr and Ars Logica's Tony White, both are analysts paid special attention to keep the forums clear and jargon free for the attendees. The attendees questions ranged from best practices to interoperability. The different CMS projects and vendors were able to talk about their experience in the different areas and the solutions their products offered.

Next year
The CMS Expo was a great opportunity to get out and talk with people about TYPO3. We are looking forward to returning next year with more people and presentations. It is clear that awareness of TYPO3 is on the rise and with the San Francisco TYPO3 conference less than a month away we are looking forward catching up with some of the people we talked to in Chicago.