TYPO3 v10 - Safe and Sound

TYPO3 v10 development release cycle will focus on three areas:

• Bring innovation via independent and community-driven initiatives,
• Faster time-to-market by improved site setup and template handling,
• Stable APIs to strengthen the TYPO3 core functionality.
   

We’re very happy with the Initiative approach we’ve launched last year. Initiatives are the place where new concepts are evaluated, discussed and developed outside of the fixed roadmap for TYPO3 Core.

When they’re ready, they’re ready. If it makes sense to include results from an Initiative into TYPO3 core, it will be included. Initiatives have their own roadmap, their own timeline, and can exist as separate extensions or completely independent of the TYPO3 Core. Current hot topics within Initiatives are:

Dashboard Initiative

Richard Haeser from MaxServ is heading an approach for a Dashboard within TYPO3, bringing together lots of ideas from various other concepts built on User Experience Weeks or public extensions. The aim is to make life easier for editors on a day-to-day basis. Feel free to ping Richard for more information.

Persistence Initiative

Artus Kolanowski has done amazing research on how to bring GraphQL to TYPO3 with a proof of concept already in place. Working on new ways on how to deal with data will lead to some changes within TYPO3 Core for storing and retrieving data in a more consistent way. Oliver Hader is also researching a new permission concept for persisting data.

Progressive Web App Initiative

Tymoteusz Motylewski is working on a prototype on how data can be exposed from TYPO3 Core without having to render TypoScript-based Frontends, eventually resulting to a toolkit for building Progressive Web Apps. This initiative is still in its research phase.

Frontend Editing Initiative

Thanks to Pixelant, there is the “Frontend Editing” Extension in our public extension repository now, which people are already using in their projects since TYPO3 v8. However, we did not manage to include it in TYPO3 Core. Benjamin Kott will now take up the lead for re-evaluating the approach of Pixelant, especially with a smoother integration with Fluid templates and the Assets / Media Management, to push Pixelant’s extension even further - be sure to check out the extension from TER in the meantime.

Initiatives will likely update their current status independently from the Core development. If the results of an initiative will lead to separate packages / extensions in general, it is easier to build new functionality more quickly, instead of being bundled into TYPO3 Core’s Release Lifecycle.

TYPO3 v7 shipped with a future-proof set of Content Types via Fluid Styled Content. TYPO3 v9 brought Site Handling - to ease the pain for setting up new projects or new websites in a single TYPO3 installation. We’ve identified one further area which needs more attention: Rendering the whole page as Fluid Template. Although it is possible to do this already in various flavors, getting Fluid-based Templates and Layouts for Pages properly into TYPO3 Core also opens up ways to create reusable page templates.

In addition, other parts of TYPO3 which still run on Marker-based templates will be replaced by Fluid. Site Handling and Routing implementations will be continued to be working to ensure an even better experience for editors and integrators.

Since TYPO3 v7 the code base of TYPO3 has steadily improved, and we won’t stop now. Currently planned changes revolve around an improved Extbase Plugin API, a new Authentication API and various security-related improvements, a unified way for Dependency Injection throughout TYPO3 Core, as well as a new Hook System a.k.a. “Event Dispatcher”.

The main focus for now is to stabilize the new APIs and make required breaking changes before TYPO3 v10.0 will be released. After 10.0, new functionality with a solid migration path can be added on top, but we aim for as little as possible breaking changes after the initial v10.0 release on the way to LTS.

For this reason, the initial TYPO3 v10.0 release date is moved to July 2019. After that, regular sprint releases will be published every 8-12 weeks.

TYPO3 v10 LTS will be supported for 3 years until April 2023 by the TYPO3 community (1.5 years full maintenance, 1.5 years of security support), and another 3 years with the ELTS program until April 2026 provided by TYPO3 GmbH.

System Requirements

The requirements for running TYPO3 v10 LTS, expected in April 2020 will look like this:

• MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.2.7+, PostgreSQL 9.4+, MSSQL or SQLite
• PHP 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4
  • However, please keep in mind that PHP 7.2 will be EOL in December 2020 already.
  • Most likely support for PHP 8.0 will be added (to be scheduled for release in December 2020).
• Clients for the TYPO3 Backend
  • Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Edge, in their latest versions.
  • No support for Internet Explorer 11 anymore.

You can prepare for v10 already: If you’re running TYPO3 with MySQL, be sure to upgrade to MySQL 5.7 or higher, or migrate to MariaDB. TYPO3 already works with MySQL 5.7 or higher well enough. Also, ensure to use up-to-date web clients for managing content.

Prepare for more insights once the initiatives progress and further changes float in. In the future, you’ll see more regular updates and news on our way to TYPO3 v10 LTS.

Reach out to me if you have any questions.

Benni Mack
TYPO3 Project Leader