TYPO3 Talk With Mathias Bolt - TYPO3 is a Powerful CMS!

I live outside of Oslo, Norway, where I work in Pixelant’s Norwegian division. I am also responsible for communication in the TYPO3 Association Board.

That was back in 2003. I was reviewing different CMSes for a website project, and I got a tip about TYPO3. After trying (and failing) to write my own CMS, it was the platform that did the things I needed. Two things were especially important in the choice: Multi-site support and fine-grained user permissions.

Pixelant’s business model is built entirely on open-source software and TYPO3 in particular. Publishing our code means we contribute to a vibrant community that also helps us make our products better.

With t3kit (check out t3kit.com), have even gone one step further than many other agencies. By open-sourcing our “magic sauce”, we have created a TYPO3 website package that is aimed at speeding up every part of an agency’s site creation process. We use t3kit for every site we make, and a number of other agencies use it too. As agencies, contributing to a common starting point for sites should be just as natural as contributing to the CMS itself.

Of course, we also contribute to making TYPO3 better. We created the image-cropping feature that is now a part of the core, and we’re spearheading the Frontend Editing project at github.com/FriendsOfTYPO3/frontend_editing. I would like to encourage more of the TYPO3 community to contribute to this project. I think frontend editing will get more and more important over the next few years.

I’m not a business executive, but I have been working with TYPO3 for a long time. I am not surprised about the success of TYPO3. Luck has no significant role in that, but a lot of hard work and difficult decisions has made it into the great product it is today. On the other hand, we should consider ourselves lucky to have such a great bunch of people in our community.

I could say that TYPO3 is a powerful CMS, but not a well-known brand outside of Central Europe, but that’s very superficial. Although it could be a challenge, it is something that changes the direction of the marketing from being about the brand to bring about the actual features of the CMS. The features are the real strength and highlighting this is one of the tasks the TYPO3 Marketing Team is taking very seriously and where we’re seeing great results.

Bringing in the end-users—the buyers—into the community will be important going forward. Agencies and their customers both use TYPO3, but for different reasons. By listening more to the end-user’s thoughts and input we can build a CMS that’s not only perfect for agencies, but that also speaks clearly to the demands of the end users. I’m not saying that agencies misunderstand their customers, but that the customers’ perspective is important in shaping the product.

I often see this question asked, but I think it is based on wrong assumptions. TYPO3 and WordPress have very different goals. I would rather say that both are successful CMSes within their customer segments.

Naturally, I would like TYPO3 to have an even larger market share everywhere, and not only in our sweet spot, the professional business, higher education, and government sector. However, placing blame is not going to get us there.

The market is swamped with essentially meaningless and over-hyped marketing-messages from our proprietary and closed-source competitors. Lacking the money to build similar cloudy messages, open-source often falls into over-simplification or focusing on bling—essentially lipstick on a pig.

Essentially, open source is a difficult balancing act, but the TYPO3 Association and Company are doing a great job. The upcoming TYPO3 Guidebook is one example of how this works: Published with New York-based publisher Apress, TYPO3 is coming across as a solution that is great to work with, but that also has the real technological advantage, through tidy code, true performance, and long-term reliability. The professional’s choice.

We have to talk more about the ideals of open source. A the same time, it’s important to recognize that these are ideals and not laws. Freedom is one such ideal, and thus it’s important to understand that while contribution and community are important to a successful open source project, we can’t demand more than what the license requires. Instead, we should talk about our success stories and how contribution and community are core to that. We should also highlight how collaboration and taking responsibility in an open-source project can strengthen democracy, civil society, and overall freedom across borders.

I think it is great to see a shop like t3planet.com come online. Giving vendors the possibility to distribute open source work and get paid for it is an important way to support the creation of new and better TYPO3 software. On the improvement side, I would love it if T3Planet made this benefit even clearer, as well as highlighting the benefits of the GPL license and the open-source nature of the paid products. Those are sides of open source we speak about too seldom.

The easier the install and update process becomes, the better. Buying is an easy step, but easy maintenance means less money spent over time.

I don’t look for mistakes in others. When mistakes happen, they have one purpose: I learn from them.

Here are some of the unsung heroes of the TYPO3 community. People whom you never hear about, but they do an important job in the non-coding realm. 

• Alina Fleser
• Altan Tosun
• Amy Hunt
• Carlos Llanos
• Tony Lush

There are many more. Next time you ask me, I’ll give you another five.

Post your questions on StackOverflow. Even though I love the TYPO3 Slack, asking and answering on StackOverflow means your question is available in search engines for others to benefit from.

Being a community, TYPO3 allows your employees to build a more personal bond to one of your core technologies. Invite them to join the community and become TYPO3 Association members. Hint: Writers, sales people, and marketers are underrepresented, but will benefit greatly.

Join the TYPO3 Content, Marketing, and Documentation teams. Those are not about coding, but easy to join for everyone. They are central to all of our expansion efforts. We actually need more non-coding contributors, and it requires so little to join that it should almost be a requirement for every contributing agency to also contribute to these teams.

Skiing, swimming, and of course effective web writing.