Report from the TYPO3 Developer Days 2013

From July 4 to 7, 175 TYPO3 developers met at the Elbcampus, the training center of the Hamburg Chamber of Crafts. In the three days before, there was already a meeting of the Active Contributers to coordinate future strategies.

jweiland.net once again supported the Developer Days as a premium sponsor and we were on site with three employees.

Workshops on current topics were held in parallel in 5 rooms on all days. In contrast to conferences, the participants worked on the tasks in groups.

One important topic was TYPO3 version 6.2, which will be released at the end of October. As a Long Term Support version, this will again be actively supported for at least 3 years. Special emphasis is placed on a smooth transition from version 4.5. There is a separate working group for this purpose. The most frequently used extensions should be compatible with version 6.2.

In the 'Responsive Images' workshop, changes were made to css_styled_content so that editors can easily use images for Responsive Web Design. It is planned that the changes will be incorporated into version 6.2.

As the entire TYPO3 documentation is gradually being converted to the "reStructued Text" (reST) format, the topic was dealt with intensively in workshops. On Saturday, the "reST Documentation Day", Martin Bless gave an hourly introduction to the topic.

Helmut Hummel led a best-practice workshop on the topic of security and used specific examples to demonstrate various attack scenarios and countermeasures.

Kay Strobach led a workshop on the provision of ready-made design templates (themes) in TYPO3. The technical requirements for these templates were defined so that they can be made available in TYPO3.

Unit tests can be used to improve software quality and automatically check code for errors. In a workshop, Oliver Klee showed interested developers how to use PHPUnit tests in extension development with Extbase. Rens Admiral organized a similar workshop for developers of TYPO3 Flow applications.

A workshop with Christian Müller dealt with the current NEOS version. NEOS 1.0alpha4 was also released at the weekend. At the DevDays some users still had problems with the installation of NEOS.

In workshops with Søren Schaffstein, possibilities were worked out to make it easier for newcomers to get started with TYPO3CMS/NEOS with videos or ready-made templates.

Further topics in the workshops were Continuous Integration, Elastic Search in Flow projects, Extension Feedback System, oAuth for TYPO3, File Abstraction Layer, automatic deployment, workspaces and the TYPO3 Package Builder.

A few weeks ago, Sebastian Michaelsen started creating podcasts about TYPO3. Every 14 days he publishes an interview with one of the TYPO3 developers on <link t3bits.de - external-link-new-window "T3Bits.de: a current podcast about TYPO3">t3bits.de. He used the DevDays to record numerous conversations with developers, which will be published in the coming weeks.

At the social event on Friday evening there was a buffet, cocktails and Sven Ditz as DJ. While some of the attendees had in-depth conversations and made new contacts on the terrace, others sat at their notebooks and worked hard programming.

At the Coding Night on Saturday, many patches were written, reviewed and committed and the new TYPO3 versions were pushed forward.

All in all, it was a very successful event and the participants went home with many new experiences, contacts, inspirations and ideas.