This Week in TYPO3 (Week 10, 2014)

Categories: Community, This week in TYPO3 Created by ben van 't ende
CMS Africa took place in Nairobi, Kenya, welcome to Naike Beggiato as executive secretary, TYPO3 CMS 6.2 beta6 released, a land slide victory for theme packages fund raiser.
Week ending March 7

TYPO3 CMS

Beta 6 of TYPO3 CMS 6.2 LTS released

On March 4 <link news article typo3-cms-62-lts-beta6-released>beta 6 was released. After beta 5 a lot of changes, fixes and clean up took place in areas such as File Abstraction Layer, performance and backend. On Monday March 10 the last code sprint before the much anticipated final release will take place at the <link http: www.beech.it>Beech Offices in Venlo, Netherlands. A beta 7 might emerge out of this code sprint. Happy sprinting to everyone in Venlo.

Themes

The fund raiser campaign for theme packages extension was utterly exciting until the last day, but the team consisting of Kay Strobach and Petra and Jo Hasenau pulled it of. As Jo mentions on the <link http: www.startnext.de typo3-theme-packages blog>startnext themes packages blog it was a landslide victory for the team. A total of 73 sponsors donated 12,648.- Euros. A majority of people showed a preference for the Bootstrap Base Package, so that is what the team will work on. This fund raiser campaign is an excellent example of how the TYPO3 community can contribute in a very targeted way. The project itself shows how people in the community can work together and how TYPO3 CMS functions as a solid framework to build extended functionality on. About a small year ago Jo and Kay merged their theming effort into one project.

Executive Secretary for the TYPO3 Association

The TYPO3 association <link news article welcome-naike>welcomed Naike Beggiato as executive secretary of the TYPO3 Association. Naike will be available full time to execute tasks of the Board of the TYPO3 Association. This new position will serve both TYPO3 association members and the TYPO3 community at large.

Events

CMS Garden at CeBIT

This coming week from Monday until Friday <link http: www.cebit.de>CeBIT will take place again. <link http: www.cebit.de en cebit-2014 _blank>CeBIT is the world’s leading business IT event. TYPO3 will be there sharing the CMS Garden booth with other Open Source CMS-es. In the CMS Garden you will find all the relevant open source CMS-es together. CMS Garden is a community driven event where attendants are not shy to share ideas and help each other out. German IT magazine <link http: t3n.de news cebit-2014-10-messe-highlights-531775>T3N recommends CMS Garden in their Top Ten of CeBIT highlights. If you would like to join the booth let us now and send a mail with some details to <link>ben@typo3.org about yourself and the day you are planning to come and we will get back to you with the details on how to participate.


CMS Africa, Nairobi, Kenya

This past Friday and Saturday <link http: summit.cmsafrica.org>CMS Africa took place in Nairobi, Kenya. Through my contacts in the <link http: www.meet-magento.com>Meet Magento community I was connected to Oduor Jagero, organiser of the summit. The importance of this event is evident and I decided to travel to Africa together with my friend <link https: www.linkedin.com profile>Kuba Zwolinski and <link https: www.linkedin.com profile>Thomas Fleck from the Meet Magento community after 'picking' them up In Madrid at the <link http: es.meet-magento.com>Meet Magento Madrid event. A Meet Magento event is a place where merchants, developers and service providers meet each other. It is an interesting concept that I have discussed with several people in the TYPO3 community before. Quite a few companies work with TYPO3 as well and I also met Italians that will be at the <link http: www.t3campitalia.it>TYPO3camp Italy. Even though there was no reserved budget for this event the marketing team decided to support this event with sponsorship. This support came at the right time for the organisation of the CMS Africa summit. The event itself took place on the grounds of Strathmore University and was opened by the dean of the IT faculty especially urging the student to smile and be happy. Of course good advise, but the Africans look quite happy and smiling to me anyway. It must be the sun that does that. Besides my Meet Magento friends, Ruth Cheesely and David Hurley from Joomla were also there representing Open Source from the European continent. Joomla and Wordpress are pretty popular on the African continent, but there also quite some people that had already worked with TYPO3, but until now there are no major TYPO3 implementations in Africa. The attendants were largely students from Nairobi and also from Mombassa, Kenya's second largest city and from Kampala, Uganda. I had a half hour presentation (<link http: www.slideshare.net benvantende cms-africatypo3communityodp>slideshare) were I introduced the TYPO3 community, talked about community in general and ended by introducing our TYPO3 family and the features of CMS and Neos. What I really got from the summit is that mobile is strongly on the rise in Africa. There is a huge opportunity in a combination of mobile and e-commerce, but they are also on the verge of getting to more complex websites on the road to a digital Africa. A Content Management System like TYPO3 CMS would be of great value to support that journey. The language of Kenya is Swahili. It is really remarkable that we always kind of proud that TYPO3 is translated in almost all languages, except Swahili. My conclusion is that there is no need for that. English is the preferred language in East Africa and I was really blown away be how well versed the people are using English. There were quite a large amount of sessions I attended that were about the coming challenge. In one session it was stressed how important it is not to re-invent the wheel and to makes use of the technology that is already there especially pertaining to Content Management Systems. A session on comparing a community to a village was also very close to my heart as that comes very close to the analogy we use in CMS Garden. Dr. Bitange Ndemo, former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Communications Kenya, urged the audience in his closing keynote to partner with the European guests. Dr. Ndemo just came back from <link http: www.mobileworldcongress.com>Mobile World in Barcelona and was obviously very inspired by the talks he heard there. He specifically mentioned Mark Zuckerberg's talk and the IBM keynote on <link http: www.research.ibm.com labs watson index.shtml>Watson, the deep question answering natural-language computer system. As far as I understood IBM promised special cloud access to this system to support the digitalisation of Africa. According to the Mc Kinsey report “<link http: www.mckinsey.com insights high_tech_telecoms_internet lions_go_digital_the_internets_transformative_potential_in_africa>Lions go digital”, Africa is going digital. 16% of 1 billion African are online and this figure is 50% for the urban areas. This figures will grow to 50% of Africans being online in 2025. The report also mentions a growing wave of innovation and the launch of new web-based ventures. Dr. Ndemo sees a huge opportunity for the Kenyan people and from a broader perspective the African people should seize, but he also stressed the importance of education and certification. The Mc Kinsey report mentions six sectors of economic growth and social transformation. TYPO3 CMS strength lies in two sectors education/universities and e-government. This is an excellent opportunity as well for the TYPO3 project to reach out to these institutions and provide resources and educate on the strength and features of TYPO3 CMS in these domains. Africa can make use of techniques we have already developed and learn from the mistakes we made earlier and are in the position to skip an entire phase we had to go through. As I see it Open Source can and should play a big part in that, especially also in the gathering of data, which can be a community based effort. The summit had more than 200 people attending, there were very interesting talks and workshops. We all connected very well, which will undoubtedly lead to future undertakings. The event was covered by awesome African weather. I am already looking forward to CMS Africa 2015 Check out the events calendar for a user group meeting, code sprint or other event near you: <link http: typo3.org events>typo3.org/events/. Do not hesitate to share you TYPO3 activities in 'This Week in TYPO3'. Just let me (@benvantende) know what you are up to.