Batteries recharged!

By: François

Core Team meeting + T3DD09 = 1 full week doing nothing but TYPO3.

High spirits at the community awards (picture by Mario Rimann)

Last week was as hectic as it was exhilarating. From Monday to Wednesday I joined the Core Team meeting in Hamburg, Germany. On Thursday morning we moved to Elmshorn, in the Hamburg suburb, for the TYPO3 Developer Days 2009, which lasted until Sunday.

Many things were discussed during the Core Team meeting. Some topics were organisational, like finding a release manager for TYPO3 version 4.4 or taking up some of the many tasks handled by Michael Stucki. Other topics were related to version 5 and how to prepare for the transition. Unsurprisingly a lot of time was spent on ExtBase, the backport of FLOW3 into TYPO3 version 4.3, which represents a major step in bringing version 4 and version 5 closer. This looks very promising.

I keep a really good impression of this meeting. The atmosphere was very constructive. People expressed a lot of ideas, which led to a lot of discussions, but everything happened smoothly and with great respect for one another. Sometimes discussions turn bitter in the mailing lists. This does not happen so easily when meeting face to face and it proves how valuable these meetings are. Remarkably all decisions were taken by consensus, which is far better that voting. Voting implies winners and losers, which is never good. You can see how intense this meeting was by taking a look at the protocol (see link below). It's very rough, but it will give you an idea.

T3DD09, starting Thursday afternoon, was no less intense. The Developer Days are a nearly unique opportunity to meet a lot of people from the community. It is always enjoyable to finally put a face on someone who had only been an email address until then. I attended only a few sessions and rather spent most of my time talking to people, getting some questions settled and raising even more new ones during impromptu brainstorming. Since I was anyway devoting my whole week to TYPO3, I also started working on the integration of extension "Gabriel" into the Core, in order to provide TYPO3 with a scheduling engine.

Some highlights of T3DD09 include the brilliant TYPO3 4.4 kick-off speech by Benni Mack, the creation of a group decided to tackle issues with versioning and workspaces, an off-the-record meeting about the future of TemplaVoilà, an impressive demo of ExtJS capabilities by Nils Dehl and an eye-opening talk about JavaScript by Karsten Dambekalns. Thanks to Kasper, we also had the first ever TYPO3 community awards, a funny and pleasant surprise (especially since I got one; thanks). One sure thing, boys and girls, this community is alive and kicking!

I had a great time and enjoyed being immersed in the community again. My batteries are fully recharged. Let's keep rocking!

PS: and there were two new flavours of Bionade!