10 years of TYPO3

By: Patrick Gaumond

March 27th 2003 is the day I downloaded TYPO3 for the first time. Few hundreds more downloads later it's time for a recap...

 

Seven years ago I took time to document my early attempt in the TYPO3 world it is still available in part 1 and part deux. I will not retell the whole story but do a quick recap :

2003

- First download, thanks to Kasper's "Getting Started" I got a pretty good feeling TYPO3 is my answer after few days "playing" with it.

- October, launch of the FSA website with 800 TYPO3 pages from the orginal 400 static files.

2004

- January, first T3BOARD (third in TYPO3 history). Meeting 80 TYPO3 enthousiasts, Kasper, Daniel Hinderink, Ingmar, Mathias, Stucki... Putting face on emails was a major boost to urge me to give back to this community.

- October, Kasper is in Québec as a guest for a full day about open source CMSes. This was the second seed of TYPO3 popularity in Québec after my initial promotion at Université Laval. After this day, TYPO3 projects started to bloom in Québec Government's Agencies. 

2005

- January, my second T3BOARD, this time with my soon to become boss. This time we were about 120 enthousiasts. A tremendous experience to spend so much time with people so close to the future of the software.

- Autumn, with Pierre Rouwens, we started having monthly meetings with local people under the name "TYPO3 Québec" as a user group.

2006

- Now working on the prototype that became www.ulaval.ca I'm back doing TYPO3 "in the open". Sebastian Kuerfurst came visiting me for 3 weeks at home in Autumn.

First T3CON in Karlsruhe, I still have the dark crimson t-shirt. :) My hotel room was the infamous Room 404... 

2007

- Someone at Fujitsu think I could help spread open source and TYPO3 in the Government. I took the risk of leaving Université Laval to become a consultant.

Presentation about TYPO3 at ConFoo 2007.

During this year I started having many customers in the health sphere and  it stayyed that way until 2012.

Second T3CON for me in Karlsruhe.

2008

Many small and medium TYPO3 projects.

- September. Got a 6 months contract for project management without touching TYPO3. That was a bit hard but manageable... :)

2009

First North American T3CON in Dallas. I had the pleasure to meet Jeff and Ron. My first presentation ever in english with Pierre Rouwens about FLOSS at Fujitsu. I passed the exam and became, with Pierre, the only TYPO3 Certified Integrators in North America.

After having putting lots of effort to use TYPO3 at DMR/Fujitsu, I began to see a diminishing interest from higher ranking people for open source at Fujitsu. I also felt the company was just "too big" for me. In about 45 minutes, I got a first interview booked and finaly decided to go with Infoglobe, a company known for its TYPO3 work since 2005.

I made a pretty good decision and started right away to give Admin Training and Webmaster Training.

2010

Second T3CON in Dallas, this time talking about TYPO3 history in Québec and how we worked to make it popular in Government agencies. I had the joy to finally meet Ries Van Twisk. It was also the first TYPO3 Certification Exam I was proctoring. Ron, Philippe Moreau, Philippe Fekete and Ries all got their certifications on their first try.

This was also the year of the MAMROT (www.mamrot.gouv.qc.ca). At that time the biggest TYPO3 project I had worked on with about 1500 pages and we worked on the then new Apache Solr search engine extension from DKD. It search into 17 000 pdfs in less than 2 seconds. I liked it a lot.

2011

Infoglobe did something big that year... We sent 6 people to T3CON in San Francisco. The whole team helped with t-shirts and registration and many other tasks during the event. It was great to see all my co-workers finally being integrated with the community. Simon, Yann, Pierre, Michael, Mehdi and me learned lots of new stuff and extend our social networking.

At the end of Summer I took an exam to be able to work for the Government, feeling tired of having too many clients while so few time to get the job right... I'll come back to this one later.

Last T3CON in Germany in October (6th trip all TYPO3-related !). I gave a presentation under the title "Simplifying the Backend for Human Beings".

2012

A year with many TYPO3 projects, also the year Libéo bought Infoglobe.

It's also the year a 5 years dream came true : T3CON in Québec City !

The event was a success and we got people from 7 different countries. In case you miss the Flickr pictures the +700 photos are there

It was such a joy to see all those people from around the Globe getting together to share knowledge, tips and tricks. Even once the event was officially done, we had a tremendous burgers & hot-dogs BBQ with nearly 40 attendees.

2013

It started the year with a brand new job for the "Ministère de l'Éducation, des Loisirs et du Sport". Here I'm still working with TYPO3 on a daily basis but at a "higher" level than usual, more in the technical sphere. We just have migrate a site that was part of another infrastructure: Enseignement supérieur, Recherche, Science et Technologie

The end? No way!

What I learned from 10 years of TYPO3 is not just about computers but a lot about friendship, culture diversity and giving back. I'm pretty fond of the TYPO3 slogan "Inspiring People to Share". I recall one of my first email to Kasper in 2003 where I wrote something similar to: "I'm not a coder so please tell me how I could help the project, how to give back?".

Ten years later, I still use the product, I saw it evolves, I met many people from different horizon and I feel quite happy by what I gave back to TYPO3 community. Just have a look at typo3quebec.ca to see how alive is TYPO3 here. And without trying to play the humble guy, I know that without that download, 10 years ago, none of those would run under TYPO3...

 

PS: If I ever met you or wrote to you because of TYPO3, if you code something and put it on TER, if you help someone understanding TYPO3 or wrote some documentation, consider my infinite gratitude. There's no software without people... 

 

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