TYPO3 v5—The mental Transition
The upcoming Version 5 of TYPO3 is rewritten from scratch. It is based on a new framework called FLOW3. With TYPO3 v5 the [API|Application Programming Interface] will change completely[1]. There are also a couple of new programming paradigms and patterns. Personally, I am very enthusiastic about the “new way”.
The past couple of months I had numerous discussions about the new version and how to migrate from TYPO3 v4 to v5. And I had to realize that there are several reservations and concerns about all the new things to learn. All of them have to be taken into account to keep the community healthy.
The people I have talked with had different backgrounds (different knowledge about TYPO3, different involvement in the community, etc.). Most of them asked one of the following questions:
- When will TYPO3 v5 be available?
- How to migrate content?
- How to migrate code (extensions)?
- How to migrate me?
Questions 1.-3. are already covered by an article of the v5 team. The most underestimated question is, how to cope with the mental transition of the developers. Many developers pointed out that they do not have enough time to dig into the new version. Maybe that is a question of how to weight the time spent on daily business and the time spent on (self) education. This prioritization has to be done not only by the developer himself but also by the company he is working for. Therefore, many of the developers decided to wait until FLOW3/TYPO3 v5 is released at a future point in time.
To enable the developers to get in touch with the paradigms of FLOW3 as soon as possible was my personal motivation to be involved in doing a back-port of the FLOW3 [MVC|MVC stands for Model-View-Controller, a way to separate different concerns of an application] frame-work. The result is ExtBase, a new frame-work for extensions and a successor of [pi_Base|The standard Plugin Base Class of TYPO3 v4]. It will be shipped with TYPO3 v4.3. It is planned to be released in May, 2009.
Furthermore, I am very happy about the decision at the TYPO3 snowboard tour[2] to back-port Fluid, too. Fluid is a very sophisticated new templating engine mainly developed by Sebastian Kurfürst.
ExtBase in companion with Fluid encourages the developer of TYPO3 v4 based extensions to code the FLOW3 style right now. There is already an example extension called BlogExample available[3]. At time of the release of v4.3 we also plan to give a good documentation at hand.
Although we implemented already 80% of the features there is quite a lot of work to do (e.g. implementing view helper classes, doing code reviews, and integration testing, writing documentation and tutorials). Do not hesitate to send me a message, if you want to lend us a helping hand.
Footnotes
- TypoScript will be available in an enhanced, object oriented form ↑
- The T3BOARD is my favorite community event. As the weather was bad good this year, we were forced to do a lot of coding ;-) . ↑
- You can download ExtBase, Fluid, and the BlogExample via Subversion: https://svn.typo3.org/TYPO3v4/CoreProjects/MVC/ ↑
I find myself exactly in that conundrum. I have the professional demands, plus the duties of v4 Core Team member (not to mention a family :-) ). All that leaves me with very little time to investigate FLOW3 et al.
Your work on ext_base is indeed an excellent way to smoothe the transition. I’m very thankful to you for that. Keep it up!
When TYPO3 4.3 is out i’ll have to convince my boss to get more self-education time. I’m happy that 4.3 will be some kind of path to FLOW3.
Thanks for the information. New version of typo3 is looking very nice. And in new version you can get some more features compare to old one.
I really love Extbase and Fluid! It’s so cool to develop new Extensions – also, the new extbase_kickstarter kicks ass :)