TYPO3 v13 Roadmap Announcement

If we were to encapsulate the essence of the TYPO3 v13 release series in a catchphrase, it would be “Minimizing repetitive tasks and simplifying day-to-day work of administrators and editors”.

This comes down to two main challenges. The first is to improve the user’s experience when interacting with the TYPO3 backend. This process should be easy, self-explanatory, and guided. The second is to streamline and eliminate recurring actions.

It is important to understand that this article is based on our current plans, and everything outlined here is subject to change. Although we have some exciting ideas, some of them are ambitious and may elude us.

In the following sections we’ll shed more light on our plans for TYPO3 v13 so you know what you can expect in the next few months.

Based on the feedback from the community and on many conversations at conferences, bar camps, and developer days, we learned about the actions that most backend users have to do over and over again. Typical examples of integrators’ work are creating sites, implementing backend layouts, and configuring user permissions. These are steps to prepare a new and empty TYPO3 instance for editors. Tasks that integrators have to do for every new TYPO3 installation. Editors’ training and support in entering the site content often follow this action.

We plan to simplify these processes and minimize the efforts required in the user’s day-to-day business in TYPO3 v13. Some ideas are, for example, interactive wizards that guide users through the steps and actions necessary.

We also aim to make these processes configurable and duplicable for integrators. Once an integrator or developer creates a workflow for a client, the configuration should be easily reusable for other clients. An export+import function or an improved duplication process for content are possible options.

We constantly strive to keep the TYPO3 backend up-to-date with the latest technologies and to implement the latest requirements for accessibility in the best possible way. TYPO3 v12 LTS is already equipped with extensive features in this regard. TYPO3’s granular user access permissions and built-in privacy and security standards make it a popular choice for Governments and the public sector.

To meet and exceed the strict requirements of the public sector, we will continue to optimize the accessibility and modernize the backend.

We have a selection of further ideas for the release series and, eventually, for TYPO3 v13 LTS:

• External system integration: New APIs will simplify the integration of external services such as Google Analytics, Matomo, Facebook and others.
• Simplified Workspaces: We will introduce a “simple mode” to make Workspaces more usable for smaller projects and sites.
• Image rendering: We will update TYPO3’s image rendering component to support modern, cutting-edge image formats out of the box.
• Content Blocks: Based on the Structured Content Initiative, Content Blocks will offer better, native support for custom, semantically structured content elements.
• (and more, not specified yet)

PHP version 8.2 is the minimum requirement to run TYPO3 v13. This is just a small step from version 8.1, which TYPO3 v12 requires, and lets us leverage Symfony version 7, released in November 2023.

PHP version 8.2 will receive security updates for the next two years until December 2025.

Thanks to the database abstraction layer Doctrine, TYPO3 supports a range of database servers and engines. We plan to update Doctrine to version 4 (once marked as stable) in TYPO3. TYPO3 v13 will support the following database engines:

• MySQL version 8.0.17 or higher
• MariaDB version 10.4.3 or higher
• PostgreSQL version 10.0 or higher
• SQLite version 3.8.3 or higher

Every major TYPO3 release allows us to upgrade third-party dependent packages following our deprecation policy. We plan to raise the versions of the following packages in TYPO3 v13:

• Symfony version 7
• Doctrine DBAL version 4

We plan to publish five releases in less than 10 months:

We will support each TYPO3 sprint release (v13.0 to v13.3) until the next minor version is published. The long-term support version TYPO3 v13 LTS (aka version 13.4) will receive bug fixes until 30 April 2026, and we will provide security patches for TYPO3 v13 LTS until 31 October 2027.

TYPO3 version 13.0 will be published in January 2024. As usual, the initial series release removes outdated and previously deprecated components and APIs. Stay tuned for further changes and improvements announced with each sprint release over the next 10 months until the LTS-release in October 2024.