TYPO3 Phoenix Status Update

By: Sebastian Kurfürst

Today, I'd like to give you a status update about TYPO3 Phoenix on behalf of the team, showing our recent progress.

The TYPO3 Phoenix Team at T3DD11

During the last two months, we have made fantastic progress with the Phoenix* backend, making it more stable and usable. We abandonded some of the previous concepts for the backend due to complexity issues on the implementation side and usability glitches. Integration with the WYSIWYG Editor Aloha became easier, cleaner and more robust and while focus is on content editing right now, work on features for power-users is planned for the near future.

In stepping back and reflecting on the project's progress at the Developer Days in July this year, we concluded that development had stalled and some of the concepts did not work out as expected. We realised that the currently used technologies would not lead the project to a future-proof and stable user interface with great usability. That's why we decided to develop a prototype, using some technologies other than the ExtJS JavaScript framework.

I'm incredibly happy that our experiment from two months ago turned out so well. In addition to ExtJS, we are using SproutCore 2 now, which, after an initial learning curve, increased our productivity and made the system more stable. Furthermore, we can now re-use a lot of features from FLOW3, which will further flatten the learning curve for developers experienced with Extbase, Fluid or FLOW3.

SproutCore is a JavaScript framework built on jQuery which delivers a reduced feature set: It only allows to connect the user interface to a data model and adjusts the user interface when the model changes. This "data binding" enables to build very loosely-coupled applications, and makes composition of components very easy and understandable. As there is no need for complex event handling code anymore, complex features can be implemented in less time.

Of course, ExtJS is still used in parts of the backend where rich out-of-the-box widgets, like trees or grids are needed -- as they are having a very high quality and are very robust.

Details of the progress and a demo will be unveiled at the TYPO3 Conference (T3CON11) in Hanau at the beginning of October -- stay tuned!

See you at T3CON11,
Sebastian

*TYPO3 Phoenix is the code name for our next generation enterprise web content management system. It is written from scratch, based on the already developed framework FLOW3 and the concepts and experience from earlier TYPO3 versions.