With holidays and all events going on I did not have the time to do a weekly wrap up so here are a lot of weeks bundled. Lets get into the weekly rhythm again. It is hard to do that without contributions. I do need input from the community, so get your info to me about what you have done for the community and what meaningful stuff there is going on for the TYPO3 project and community.
TYPO3 CMS
The TYPO3 CMS team has regained a lot of momentum after an initial period following the release of TYPO3 CMS 6.2. Benni Mack is one of the leaders of the core team and at the Active Contributor Meeting in Munich he presented a vision for the future, based on info gathered at the ACME in Nuremberg.
Keeping TYPO3 CMS moving forward can be boiled down to two areas: Embrace what we have and Innovate where possible and necessary. The usability team has been merged into the CMS core team. User Experience is an important part of any piece of software and the merger is beneficial for the further development of TYPO3 CMS.
The momentum TYPO3 CMS became even more clear at the user experience week, where 30 people gathered to work on themes, distributions and usability. Felix Kopp gave a presentation, similar to the Munich ACME one, about the TYPO3 CMS backend. The UXW had a very mixed and diverse attendance with a lot of new faces. The majority of the attendants were editors shedding light on their daily work, opening up perspectives to the hard-core-coders. The organisation was pretty specific about wanting many different people. The topics that covered were also pretty diverse. A lot of work was done on concepts for the TYPO3 CMS backend. T3UXW15 is already planned from March 21 - 28 at the same wonderful location in the Harz. The date is specifically shifted to the first half of 2015 so activity can be picked up by the Developer Days.
TYPO3 CMS 7 LTS will be released in October 2015 and work on CMS 7 will start soon. There will be news on the roadmap, features etc. soon. CMS 7 promises to be an exciting milestone in the development of TYPO3 CMS.
This month TYPO3 CMS 4.5 and 6.1 will reach end of life and will not be updated or in any way supported anymore. TYPO3 CMS 4.7 will reach end of life in April of 2015.
TYPO3 Neos
From September 27 - October 5 about 30 people worked on Neos 1.2 Beta1 at a code sprint in Lungholm Castle in the south of Denmark. Neos 1.2 beta1 will be out soon according to the article. There were seven new contributors. Henjo Hoeksma organised a meeting to get feedback on what the team can do to lower the barriers for first-time contributors.
Berit Hlubek writes about the code sprint on neos.typo3.org.
This Monday a full length super sprint started to implement the remaining top features everybody was asking for, and some more. typo3.org will keep you updated.
You can also find Neos on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/typo3neos
TYPO3 Association
The marketing team in combination with the TYPO3 Association continued its Agency Meetup Tour. I was present at the meeting in Düsseldorf and the one in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Besides gathering specific information on the needs of companies, such meetups are very beneficial from a communication point of view. For the Dutch companies that meant a lot.
The trademarks are reworked for clarity and can be found on the Trademarks section.
Budget Application 2015
Some 50 budget applications were submitted for the coming year. You can find all budget application on https://forge.typo3.org/projects/t3a-eab-budget2015/boards/22. The TYPO3 Association or specifically the Expert Advisory Board appreciated feedback on the application. Please check them out and add your comments. Your input means a lot to the TYPO3 Association.
You will also be able to vote for the applications soon. There is some delay on opening the poll from what was announced earlier, but the poll will most likely open this week.
Teams
Documentation team
The documentation team met on the October 23. As usual the team has it minutes of meeting available on Forge.
Please note that Francois Suter, who has been leading the team for a very long time, will step back at the end of this year and the team needs a new leader. As a matter of fact the documentation team will gladly accept skilled new members to their team.
Design and Usability Team
Both the design team and the usability team have become sub teams. Both teams have been struggling with leadership and members and making them sub-teams of the projects they belong to actually will get them more involved. The design team is now part of the marketing team. Fabian Stein is responsible in the marketing team for design. The usability team was actually already rename to TYPO3 CMS Usability team and is now an integral part of the CMS team under leadership of Oliver Hader, Beni Mack and Felix Kopp. Felix has been very active concerning the redesign of the backend.
Events
TYPO3 conference Berlin (October 8 - 10, Berlin )
Daniel Homorodean from Arxia writes about the past TYPO3 conference in Berlin and asks himself if individual web developers and web agencies can be part of and drive this accelerated internet evolution, instead of reactively adapt to the new trends.
The conference had many topics that were not specifically TYPO3 related. It was a pleasure to have Kasper (the original creator of TYPO3) for the keynote with an inspiring talk about passion and purpose. Kasper talked what led to TYPO3 and what drives his open source hardware business (http://skaarhoj.com/)
Read the full article on the Arxia Blog.
It was great to have the conference in the capital of Germany. Next year's TYPO3 conference will be in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Inspiring conference (March 26 - 28, Kolbermoor, Germany)
The leading, international TYPO3 FLOW and TYPO3 NEOS event of the year will take place again for the fourth time in Kolbermoor. The Call For Papers is open until November 17, so hurry to submit your paper.
TYPO3camps
TYPO3camp Rhein Ruhr (November 8 - 9, Essen, Germany)
TYPO3camp Poland (November 21 - 22, Poznan. Poland)
Google Summer of Code 2014
Christian Julle Jensen, mentor to the GSoC project, gives a wrap-up of GSoC 2014 and the Mentor's Summit.
Google Summer of Code 2014 is now over. We finished with three successful student projects. Each year a Mentor's Summit wraps up the program. And to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of GSoC, the 2014 summit featured more people. As well as an extra day with a visit to a theme park and Celebration Party with prominent speakers like Linus Torvalds and Peter Norvig.
The summit is a great chance for us to interact and learn from other open source organisations by discussing common topics. Diversity, funding, full-time contribution are some of the topics we got around. And of course things related to GSoC itself.
The code of the GSoC project is a welcome contribution to our project, but the benefits for the community goes far beyond that. It is a unique chance to include new contributors. And to learn more about the challenges people meet when they want to contribute to TYPO3.
The outcome of participating in GSoC can probably be higher for TYPO3 with just a little more effort and preparation. We will try to make that happen next year and we'll need input and help from all ends of the community. We hope for your support for that. More about that later.
Thanks to Google for letting us have this great chance and to the students and mentors for a job well done.
Miscellaneous
PHP_CodeSniffer
Writing good clean code is very important, especially in a project where collaboration is essential. Andy Grunwald (Quality Assurance Team) writes about the PHP codesniffer on BUZZ and lets us know the project that already started in 2010 is back and aims for stabilisation and getting finished. The sniffer automatically checks against specific coding guidelines.
Currently Stefano Kowalke and Andy Grunwald are working on the sniffer projects. The guys are looking for motivated contributors to help in achieving the goals ahead. Please join the team if you care for clean code and can contribute. We will all benefit from clean code.
Neos on Amazon Web Services
Neos is now available as a pre-configured machine image (virtual server) at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) marketplace. Michael Schams, who already maintains a set of TYPO3 CMS 6.1 and 6.2 instances at AWS, has extended the current selection and included the next-generation open source CMS of the TYPO3 family.
The ready-to-use Debian Linux-based EC2 image is tailored for fast and secure web hosting using 100% open source packages without any license fees. It comes with Neos 1.1.2, Apache 2.2, MySQL 5.5 and PHP 5.4 pre-configured and enables everyone with an AWS account to launch these machines with a click of a button in various locations around the world. With a “root” login via SSH and an administrator account in Neos, system administrators have unrestricted access to the server and to Neos, which enables everyone to use the machine images as a foundation for a new Neos website or for trying Neos and play with it.
To launch an instance, go to http://schams.net/typo3-on-aws/marketplace/, choose your favourite version of TYPO3 CMS or Neos and follow the steps through the launch process.
Check out the events calendar for a user group meeting, code sprint or other event near you: http://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.