TYPO3 Goes to San Francisco!

By: Zachary Davis

As you no doubt know, the 3rd annual North American TYPO3 conference was announced this week. This announcement marks an important milestone for the TYPO3 project, and signals the growing adoption of TYPO3 in the US market. The growth of TYPO3 in the US is, in my view, essential to the long-term success of the project and a positive step forward for those of us who make our living working with TYPO3.

The past two North American conferences were held in Dallas and organized by Ron Hall and other members of the Dallas TYPO3 user group. These events brought together TYPO3 developers from the US, Europe, and a number of other countries. Having the chance to put faces to names and to have one-on-one conversations with folks with whom I had been exchanging emails for the past six years reminded me what a fantastic community has grown up around TYPO3. Since the first TYPO3 conference, I’ve continued to stay in touch with many of the people I met and have felt much closer both to the US TYPO3 community and the international TYPO3 community as a whole.

Holding the conference in a major coastal US city like San Francisco further elevates TYPO3‘s profile by providing all of us with an opportunity to introduce the system to US developers who haven’t yet had a chance to see the ideas and functionality in TYPO3 that drive us to choose it over other solutions day in and day out. What is even better is that the conference will come on the heels of project initiatives that are absolutely crucial to TYPO3’s long-term health and success—initiatives like the updated “getting started” guide; countless meaningful improvements to TYPO3’s backend interface and overall usability; the promise of long-term support that will come with TYPO3 4.5; rebuilt (and far more usable) workspaces publishing mechanisms; a file abstraction layer; and a general commitment to releasing the highest quality code possible, a commitment that is being driven by forward-thinking projects like Extbase, Fluid, and FLOW3. It is, in short, an exceedingly exciting time to be a part of the TYPO3 community, and I expect that the San Francisco conference will be an inspiring event for longstanding European community members as well as more recent comers in the US.

Thanks in large part to the work of Ron Hall, the conference website is now up at http://t3con11-sf.typo3.org/. The call for speakers is open, so it’s time to start coming up with ideas! I don’t know about you, but I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what people have been building using ExtBase and Fluid. Last year in Dallas, many speakers reported on their experience working with early versions of ExtBase. Since then, ExtBase has matured considerably and I suspect it’s now being used on more and more production sites (at Cast Iron Coding, we dropped our own MVC framework we’ve been using for the past 2 years in favor of ExtBase a couple months ago). I’m also looking forward to seeing the ways in which developers have taken advantage of TYPO3’s open, well-documented APIs to integrate it with external systems and applications.

The conference will run from Jun 9-11 and early registration opens on Feb 1. I’m looking forward to seeing the friends I made at last year’s conference again, and I have a feeling Ron and Marc and the other organizers are going to put together a fantastic event for us this year.

See you in San Francisco!

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This was posted on Zach's behalf. -marc

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