The web department recently returned home from this years international 2009 TYPO3 conference - held in Frankfurt. Inspired and motivated - here is a quick run down of our experiences and what excited us during the 33 talks.

Kasper Skarhøj - the original author of TYPO3 - held a short keynote, which outlined the basic design principles for the future development of TYPO3. TYPO3 has won market shares because of its strong flexibility - but the flexibility has also been the Achilles heel of TYPO3. With flexibility follows complexity. He told a parable about an english supermarket that held a big sale on jam - 30 different jams were on sale. Sales were slow, so it was decided to offer customers free tastes of the jams. Six of the jams were promoted, and sales went up by thirty percent. The management then decided to offer free tastes of all thirty jams the next day - but the result surprised them, as sales went down by thirty percent again as a result. Too many options resulted in customers not choosing anything.

The mantra for future development of TYPO3 is "strong defaults - expert options" - a slogan we fully support.

TYPO3 V5

Many talks circled around the premise of the coming TYPO3 version 5. V5 is a total rewrite of the underlying architecture of TYPO3. The focus has initially been on the components FLOW3 and Fluid - all using and supporting a MVC-style architecture. Since V5 is years away, FLOW3 has been back-ported to V4 under the name Extbase, which provides a migration path from V4 to V5.

The one session that had the most attendees was The Radically new interface for TYPO3 5.0. For reasons we do not fully understand, the TYPO3 UX and Design team has been working secretly on this project for almost two years, and this was the public's first chance to get a glimpse of where the ideas are heading.

The most dramatic change is that there will be no distinction between the backend and the front end. The website(s) are fully operated in the front end. When you log in (by adding /typo3/ after any page you're visiting), a widget-like module opens at the top of the page, and gives you access to all edit and management features. Here are a few screenshots of what inline-editing and a modal editor would look like:

It should be noted, that these are by no means final graphics - or even ideas. It is still work in progress - and should be interpreted as such. However - it is very interesting to see how radically the approach is to this redesign. See more TYPO3 V5 design and UIX screenshots and slides.

TYPO3 V4.3 / TYPO3 V4.4

We are currently at version 4.2.8 of TYPO3 and the long awaited version 4.3 was announced to be released at 28th November 2009. There are several interesting features in version 4.3 - notably, preparing a migration path to version 5. That will primarily affect extension development with the addition of a backport of FLOW (as Extbase) and Fluid - but regular users and editors will also see one important change - front end editing. Here's a small demo movie and prototypical description of the new editing feature.

TYPO3 V4 has a large code base and have been developed over many years to suit disparate needs and settings. This has allowed "gremlins" to creep in here and there, resulting in incomplete documentation, rare bugs, inconsistencies etc. The upcoming version 4.4 will focus on recitifying these gremlins, thus making TYPO3 an overall more pleasent experience for all users. So - no new features in TYPO3 v4.4 - but expect to see alot of consistency enhancements, new documentation and help, and existing bugs squashed.

Extbase

Is the new framework base for developing extension for typo3. It was originally developed for the mythical TYPO3 version 5, where it is called FLOW3. But has been back ported into typo3 version 4.3.

As with the rest of version 5 it is written completely from scratch and therefore the development team has been able make a brand new architecture for extending TYPO3, and as previously written they have decided to use the Model-View-Controller (MVC) software pattern. This architecture separates the logic from the presentation of data and, something that Typo3 has not enforced before. This new architecture is really cool as it helps to develop safer extensions, probably also lets you develop faster, and not least just makes it easer to write some nice clean extendible code.  For version 4.3 Extbase will only be for developing frontend extension, but its currently planned to extend to backend modules in version 4.4

All in all Extbase is very exciting from a developer perspective as it makes easier to make extensions to Typo3 version 4.3  and forward but more importantly it means that new extensions made using Extbase can be converted to version 5 extensions very fast.

TYPO3 webservice

In our TYPO3 setup we have several different TYPO3 installations, and sometimes it would be really great to be able to communicate between these installations - for maintenance reasons, but also for future advanced extensions. So we were quite excited about seeing that a small German company naw.info has developed an extension that exposes all TYPO3 CRUD operations as a webservice via XMLRPC. We have not yet had the time to do our own experiment with typo3_webservice - but it looks very promising. The company demonstrated the capabilities of the extension with a small application they made for the iPhone, which basically let's you shoot an image, write a caption and some text, and submit it directly to TYPO3 as a tt_news object. Pretty neat :-)

T3Flex

T3FLEX leverages the modularity of the TYPO3 framework by replacing the default front-end rendering with Flash output. The TYPO3 back-end it then used for authoring Rich Internet Applications - which is the synonyme du jour for Macromedia Flash based websites. The developers has basically built an .swc-component for Action Script 3 (AS3), that provides hooks to TYPO3, and let's you make direct calls to features in TYPO3 from your AS3 based applications (Flash / Flex). T3flex is still only in closed alpha, but those who were interested were encouraged to join the project.

www.stark-am-markt.de is an example of a website controlled dynamically with TYPO3, but apparently renders as a Flash website. Read more on www.t3flex.com

Modern skin

We noticed, as a bonus in an also excellent talk, that Jochen Rau in his Extbase talk had a quite appealing skin installed in his TYPO3.

It has not been officially released yet, but can be fetched from Subversion via the Modern skin TYPO3 forge page. We have installed it in one of our sandboxes, and the courageous editors at phys.au.dk are also currently testing it. Contact us if you wish to try it out, and consider it for your TYPO3 installation.