Today, the TYPO3 community published the first sprint release of the v8 series of TYPO3, the enterprise content management.
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The core team is proud to announce this first <link https: typo3.org news article kicking-off-typo3-v8-development>release as planned, even if CMS 7 LTS from November 2015 wasn’t too long ago. While the team is actively supporting 7 LTS with bug fixes to zap those gremlins that still survived the pressure from the adapted release cycles, we worked hard on pushing the system to the next era.
As outlined in an <link https: typo3.org news article kicking-off-typo3-v8-development>earlier news already, PHP 7.0 is the minimum requirement for v8. TYPO3 will support subsequent PHP 7 releases as they come out. This version raise gives a significant performance improvement to the overall system. Not only the backend editor will notice a more fluent interface, the new all-time record for a full cached page call in the frontend is below 7 milliseconds now, which is approximately 40% faster compared to running the very same website with PHP 5.5. We also started using new features from this PHP version, for instance the cryptographically secure pseudo-random generators are in active use already.
The development of v8 will come with further usability improvements, with its first features showing up in 8.0 already: The form builder of the system extension "form" to compose (mail) forms for you website is now directly implemented within the editing fields of backend content elements.
This is much easier to use and we will see further improvements of this kind in the future.
Standalone Fluid
Now, with v8, we’re proud to present a both fast and reliable templating engine for any PHP-based project without big dependencies on its own, together with an enterprise-grade product using this engine to its full extent. “Fluid standalone” can be easily used within other PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony and we’re looking forward to hearing about success stories.
The template engine Fluid - which was initially implemented as a backport from the FLOW framework - has been completely revised and is now added as an external dependency that is free of its roots. This development started during CMS 7 already but didn’t make it into the LTS release.
Switching to fluid standalone brings a list of <link https: docs.typo3.org typo3cms extensions core latest changelog feature-69863-usenewstandalonefluidascomposerdependency.html>incredible new features to TYPO3 CMS we’re sure integrators will be very pleased about.
Deprecation removals
There are no bugs in code that doesn’t exist. We had a lot of fun removing all lines from our codebase that were marked as deprecated within the previous major version. This early removal is part of our <link https: typo3.org teams-committees core-development resources release-lifecycle>release strategy. Getting rid of all the cruft not only streamlines code sections and opens the view to further improvements, it also sharpens the coding interfaces and improves performance.
This step is also important for extension developers: It gives authors the chance to fix remaining deprecation issues within their extensions now, long before the future final v8 LTS version, which is to be released in April 2017. Doing this work now gives extension authors a rather relaxed time for the rest of the year since from now on only dedicated areas within the core might receive further breaking changes, and only if inevitable from a core point of view. So, extension authors: Start your engines, join the race! Your input and feedback in an early stage is crucial.
More numbers
All in all, more than 900 patches made it through our review process and have been merged to the master branch since the release of CMS 7 LTS in November 2015. The number of patches waiting for reviews at any time has been reduced from around 270 to about 210 and we reached the lowest number of open issues since beginning 2008. Major efforts towards these numbers were taken during the <link https: typo3.org news article report-on-codesprint-karlsruhe-33-6316>sprint in Karlsruhe. More than 100 different authors successfully contributed to the system and again the sprints proved to be a great opportunity for new contributors to gain knowledge and join the development team.
Download
<link _blank>Download TYPO3 v8.0, get it via <link https: wiki.typo3.org composer>Composer or try out the <link https: github.com tuurlijk typo3.homestead>virtual machine provided by Michiel Roos to play around with the latest development version.
Outlook
The 8.0 release is the first step of many important sprint releases on the <link https: typo3.org typo3-cms roadmap>road to TYPO3 CMS 8 LTS which is planned to be ready in spring 2017. The next version 8.1 is already planned and works are in full swing for a release in early May 2016.
