TYPO3 Talk With Mr. TYPO3.org - Thomas Löffler

I am 41, have a family with one son. I like football, reading Science-Fiction and coding. Born in Vienna, Austria, but I live now in Stuttgart, Germany.

A former friend told me about it. We wanted to create a company to sell websites. That was in 2004. My first job was then maintaining a TYPO3 shop for a small company in 2006. Some months later I got a request from an agency. There I learned a lot about PHP and TYPO3. Also, my first TYPO3 event in Munich was at this time. There I got in contact with the community.

I contribute by using TYPO3 and spreading the word. That’s what everyone can do easily by giving kudos to all people working and improving it. Also, I write extensions, doing updates and upgrades, attending events and giving talks to share my knowledge. Besides that I work as Team Lead for the typo3.org team which is maintaining and improving the all-known websites like typo3.org and the TYPO3 extension repository.

I am happy with the system and the community. I feel lucky and love nearly every second of my daily work. Even on weekends or evenings I grab my laptop to create code out of my ideas and thoughts.

The biggest challenge was to get long term customers for having enough money every month to live a good and healthy life.

I like the integration of standard code and wide-spreaded libraries like Symfony and Doctrine. Also the possibility to create interfaces or to hook into the Core was heavily improved over the years.

In future, I want to see a system which is using many standards and helps developers to work with TYPO3. Also I hope to keep the advantages of TYPO3 regarding other CMS.

An easy some-clicks installer, heading me to a big template integration tool and extensions which are maintained and easy to use.

Regarding WordPress we miss nothing. WordPress is for Blogs, not for a multi-language company website with integrations to Newsletter and Product systems. We miss to spread the word outside of our DACH region. We would have a lot more market share when we would get much more people to use TYPO3 in e.g. United States. But we’re in a good way with the integration of Symfony/Doctrine to get in the developers heads. Also, we have some features that no one has yet.

We are lacking a good source for designs and templates. We shouldn’t go too far in the direction of WordPress where we need to put PHP into the templates. It should be possible to get a standard HTML/CSS/JS template into TYPO3 without big knowledge of these markup and programming languages. TemplaVoila was a good attempt for “I can click where the menu has to be”, but the extension missed other important things like a good data structure and a long term maintenance.

Use another tool than Slack to share the knowledge there in public.

You need to change the understanding of OpenSource in the society. OpenSource is often seen as “some code a few developers share”, but it’s quiet more. Everybody in the world is using OpenSource software and many don’t know about it. There must be more knowledge that OpenSource is better than closed source.

With OpenSource and TYPO3 you can…

...see how experienced developers are writing code
...understand what is exactly happening during usage
...improve your own code
...extend the code
...meet people who share their knowledge and experience

Global expansion is good and really important. We need more people spreading the word all over the world. Use it, talk about it, create an event to feel the community.

There were many attempts to create such a market place and I’m happy that you just created one. Sometimes it can be good to just do it and improve and adjust it later.

Quality and quantity. Many things to get, but also maintained and supported.

I don’t know if it would be more popular when powered by Java or C. PHP is easy to use and learn, but years ago it was the programming language of the “script kiddies”. When we would have built it with Java or C, it would be possible to be more popular at companies. 

I think, PHP was the right decision.

All of them together. No one needs a multilingual page with no possibility of extending it. The success came with the extensions, so everybody can extend the core and even publish it to help others.

Wrong consultancy and therefore creating technical dept even before the website is going live.

My mentors and heroes change over the years. At the beginning my eyes were on people like Kasper Skarhoj, Robert Lemke, Ingmar Schlecht, Michael Stucki to mention only a few. Today there are Benni Mack, Georg Ringer, Helmut Hummel, Nicole Cordes and Christian Kuhn. For me a hero is someone who looks over the tellerrand. Someone who just does something which is a big improvement for the whole community. This can be talks, code, visions and opinions. The community is not only coding, it’s far more than that.

As I am not too deep into Core development my biggest challenge is to get into the new features and also breaking changes of the currently newest version. Also, other technologies are interesting and important for me to connect them with TYPO3, e.g. Continuous Integration and deployments

My main source is Slack, but I like some websites and blogs like usetypo3.com to mention one. Best place to get help should be StackOverflow as this is public. Unfortunately there is most of the knowledge in a closed software Slack.

Tell the truth, do not sell yourself to cheap. Even good developers are making wrong decisions and errors. Be open and find good solutions. Together.

Create a possibility to use TYPO3 at a demo page and spread the word about the features and all the nice references/websites done with TYPO3

Unix

We always need more active contributors. There is no “we have enough”. The community is strong in development but in the last years we got many marketing, design and branding people inside. So, there is good progress.

Playing games, reading, having time with family and my community “family and friends”