TYPO3 Talk with Rino Razzi, Active TYPO3 Contributor

I live in Pisa, Italy, where I did my Computer Science studies. 

I graduated from the University of Pisa in 1997. One year before I had already funded a few friends Archimede Informatica (http://www.archicoop.it/en/), the company of which I’m still the CEO today.

Since the beginning, my company (and I) focused on the design, creation, and management of web sites and web projects. I’m an active member of the Italian and international TYPO3 community and I’ve been a member of the TYPO3 Association’s board for a few years, until 2019. Currently, I’m an active member of the TYPO3 Association Content Group, mainly focused on the management of the “T3A Members Newsletter” and the “CSM Insights Newsletter”

It was in 2003 when a client asked my company for a CMS based website. The times of hand-written HTML have passed since a few years ago. It still was the time when HTML Editor software was used to build a website (I can remember of “Front Page” and “DreamWeaver” as the main used tools in my company) and the “CMS” concept was not completely forged at that time (The first release of WordPress dates 2003). There where only a few Open Source CMS available at the time.

So, to answer my client’s request, I personally started looking for an Open Source CMS to use. It was a long work to find out and compare the best available CMS. Eventually, TYPO3 (version 3.2, if I remember well) came out like the most featured CMS available at the moment. One strong point in favor of TYPO3 was also that most of the features were already in the core so that non-plug-in needed to be installed to have them available.

My professional profile is not completely a technical one. My main contribution to TYPO3 has been on the community-building side, even though I’m TYPO3 Certified Integrator and Editor. Since 2010 I have been working for creating and growing up the Italian Community, organizing the “T3Camp Italia” yearly events and then the “TYPO3 Day” events at the Internet Festival of Pisa - Italy. In my company, we strongly believe that Open Source software is a synonym for quality and transparency that together bring security and long term good investments. Every time it is possible we choose open source software for our work.

We also encourage our employees to contribute to the communities of the software we use, allowing them to spend part of their time on that. As a result of this, my company has published a few TYPO3 extensions on the TYPO3 Extension Repository: Cookie Law Management (https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/aip_cookie_law/) and Vimeo Ads Video Player (https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/aip_vimeo/). We are also working on the publication of some more extensions that we developed as part of our client’s project. A huge contribution of my company to the TYPO3 project is the localization of the Italian version of the Italian typo3.com website: typo3.it

No surprise at all! When I started using TYPO3 it was already evident the power of the system and how much it was far ahead of many of the other existing CMS. Some concepts of the backend (like the page tree and the content element) have been there since the beginning to help editors with their daily work while many other CMS still are missing them. The security and reliability of TYPO3 are also one of the reasons for his success. My company has created and managed so many TYPO3 based websites in the last 20 years having so few security and technical issues

We have still a lot to do in order to bring TYPO3 on its deserved position in the global scene: the well-known, widely adopted enterprise open source CMS of choice for government, universities and corporations. We are working with a fantastic technical tool, developed by wizard programmers, but our beloved framework is not yet globally embraced and this is what I want to contribute in changing. I am not surprised, nor feeling lucky, but feeling eager to help achieve the goal of having TYPO3 all over the world.

The biggest challenge was to convince my company’s clients to use a CMS that they never heard before (in Italy, most clients just know about WordPress, some of them know about Drupal). Another difficult thing was to make clients understand the very good ROI coming from investing in a powerful tool like TYPO3 for their web project.

It’s hard to predict the future of TYPO3. What I see is that the TYPO3 project with both his strong community and the TYPO3 Company (his operative arm whose creation took place a few years ago as an initiative of the TYPO3 Association) has solid foundations that make it ready to face all the technical challenges that the Information Technology industry is putting on the table more and more quickly.

There isn’t something really missing in the TYPO3 strategy for a better spread. What I think is that there is not a CMS that can be considered the best solution for any situation. WordPress, for example, is a very good solution for blogs and small websites. On the other hand, TYPO3 is very good for enterprise solutions where complex websites, integrated with other systems (like CRM, ERP, e-Commerce, … ), with editorial workflow and so on are required. So, it's somehow natural that WordPress has such a huge market share because it meets the needs of a wide base of CMS users for simple blogs and cheap websites. One of the things where the TYPO3 project needs to work on, one of its weak points, is it’s being based in the central European area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). But I know, from my experience as a Board Member of the TYPO3 Association, that this is a known weakness of the project and people are working hard to spread TYPO3 in other areas of the world. One good example is the recently released localized versions of the typo3.com web site: typo3.it, typo3.in, and typo3.fr are online, and many more localizations are on the way. Interesting initiatives have been supported and continue being supported by the TYPO3 Association to bring TYPO3 in other countries and continents like Africa, Asia, USA.

Documentation has been a sore point of TYPO3 for a long time. It was as important as the system is complex (and powerful, on the other hand). Nowadays, the official documentation has been widely updated and enriched. A huge work has been done during the last few years at least for the improvement of the core documentation. A lot of work is still needed, for example for extensions' documentation, but the right road has been taken and the situation is quickly evolving in the right way. Localized documentation is also a problem that slows down the adoption of TYPO3. This issue, in my opinion, would be fixed naturally as soon as the user's base and national users' communities of TYPO3 will grow up.

I repeat here what I heard so many times while attending TYPO3 and other open-source software events: “Open source software” does not mean “Free software”! Instead, it means quality, security, reliability provided that you have a wide community of developers, users that stand behind the software-product. If a company’s management understands this fundamental truth, if it understands that the community is as important as the software itself, then it will understand sharing and collaborate (which, in my opinion, are the main elements of the OpenSource ethics)  are the key factors to maintain and grow the community and, by that way, the product itself.

A good selection of TYPO3 extensions with good and reliable documentation. A sort of “warranty” that those extensions will be upgraded as soon as a new LTS version is released, would also be interesting.

I’d say multilingual.

The main place for getting help with TYPO3 is the various TYPO3 Slack channels.
Very useful for me is Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/).

Also, I would not underestimate the use of Twitter: I learned so many things just following the official twitter accounts other than some very active people of the TYPO3 community.

There is another Open Source Software I've been using for nearly 20 years: Open Journal System - OJS (https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/). OJS is a vertical CMS solution for managing and publishing scholarly journals.

OJS is a comprehensive tool for managing the entire submission and editorial workflow and publishing journals’ articles and issues online.
Similarly to TYPO3, it has a wide community of users and developers.

New contributors are always needed and welcome in the TYPO3 community. There are so many things to do to have a better TYPO3 that contributions are never enough. What is important to understand is that you don’t need to be a techie person to contribute. You don't need to be an HTML, CSS, or PHP guru. Any type of know-how can be very useful: editors, translators, designers, marketing, user interface experts, etc...

So, if you want to contribute don't be shy and get in touch with the TYPO3 community, have a look at this page: https://typo3.org/community/contribute 

I love staying with my family and with friends, snorkeling, and playing soccer.