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:

1. When will TYPO3 v5 be available?
2. How to migrate content?
3. How to migrate code (extensions)?
4. 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 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. 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.