Goodbye v8 - you've served us well!
Today also marks the last official public release of TYPO3 v8 LTS published by myself and the TYPO3 Community. For myself, an era ends. Here is a brief recap of our development phase and some milestones related to TYPO3 v8.
The first release - v8.0 - happened on March 22nd, 2016 - roughly around 4 years ago from today. The first version was the first time that we had our deprecation policy in place, so a lot of changes have been removed before the first released.
Database Abstraction via Doctrine
One of my personal highlights was the introduction of Doctrine DBAL - and for the first time, we had a real database abstraction layer from Doctrine, that was robust, tested and available for dozens of database systems - so we removed our "DBAL" based on the "adodb" libraries but kept them as a backwards compatible layer. This gave us true database abstraction without a performance penalty - our code base is tested against MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and - since TYPO3 v9 - SQLite on each code change. All possible because of Doctrine DBAL.
This change affected almost all parts of the TYPO3 Core, making this change of the largest in history - which was done by a large amount of contributor across various code sprints. Initially developed by Morten Jonuschat, this Database Abstraction Layer reduces the risk of SQL injection because all database code had to be migrated and due to proper documentation - best practices were applied directly.
New system extensions - CKEditor and Form Framework, Fluid Standalone
The extraction of "form" (into form_legacy) and "HTMLArea" gave birth for new and more modern systems - the Form Framework and CKEditor. Both make it much easier to use and comprehend than their predecessor functionalities.
Fluid Standalone - our Templating engine - was born and added, making TYPO3 Core only an extension to the Fluid templating engine.
And of course - there are so many more highlights and numbers we want to mention:
- We've started using subtree splitting for our system extensions, making composer a first-class citizen
- We've introduced Symfony Console to write Command-Line-Code in a unified way
- The Install Tool provided an upgrade analysis tool to render the documentation change log files
- TYPO3 v8.0.0 was released on March 22nd, 2016, the first LTS version (8.7.0) was published on April 4, 2017 and the last release is today - March 31st, 2020.
- TYPO3 v8 was the first TYPO3 version that required PHP v7.0, and up to today supports PHP v7.4 as well - supporting a total of five different PHP versions.
- TYPO3 v8 is the only version where one could use Fluid Styled Content and CSS Styled Content side by side and exchange it in both ways, to make the upgrade to Fluid Styled Content. CSS Styled Content was removed in TYPO3 v9.
A big thank you for every nice word, all the efforts, time, documentation, code, contribution and support for the last 4 years to make this major version release cycle a very special one to me!
For everyone running on TYPO3 v8 or TYPO3 v7 - check out TYPO3 GmbH's ELTS program to get extended support for TYPO3.
