TYPO3 Talk with Tim: Author Of TYPO3 Blogger

As you said, my name is Tim. I am a PHP backend developer at HDNET GmbH & Co. KG in Werther, Germany and focused on TYPO3 and Symfony projects. I love OpenSource and in my free time I love playing games in the garden (Kubb, KanJam etc.).

I started working with TYPO3 in summer 2006. After a few weeks I started blogging about TYPO3 on typo3blogger.de which was a huge knowledge base for me. It is hard to understand technical problems in TYPO3 but even harder to explain them to other people in a way they understand the problem. I love the community ecosystem around TYPO3 and visit many Snowboard tours, Developer days, conferences and camps.

The company I am working for has a TYPO3 gold membership to support the TYPO3 Association. Me and other colleagues contribute via code to the TYPO3 ecosystem. There are many extensions out there, that are the result of the daily agency business (e.g. calendarize or autoloader).

I think the biggest challenge is, to keep TYPO3 on a high and professional level. There are many people who do not know how OpenSource really works and how much time/money or free commitment a product like TYPO3 needs to keep this level.

I started working with TYPO3 with version 3.8.0. Since that version TYPO3 move forward as an evolution. It is always a balancing act between compatibility and modern architecture. In the last years it is more a revolution instead a evolution. The PHP community around us speed up the change process also for TYPO3. PSR, Symfony more „strong default“ push TYPO3, but connect us to other products in the market.

I think TYPO3 will be more and more PSR-X related. It will be easier to integrate other components in TYPO3. Based on other great open source components TYPO3 can focus on editor experience and other cool features :)

TYPO3 is missing a “easy start”. The Introduction Package or Different Template structures are a good start, but nevertheless: WordPress is easier to install than TYPO3. Furthermore there are technologies like composer, that push TYPO3 in a „more complex“ structure.

As already said. There are missing themes and smoother integration of extensions. If you use a WordPress plugin, it just works. TYPO3 has always a small integration process (select TS template etc.) and this process is always different. But I think this is not a problem. TYPO3 has many other strengths.

I think the community pushes the software a lot. I think there was a Community Manager in the past that pushed TYPO3 in different markets (other countries but also other communities). I think a good community is important for a stable open source ecosystem.

I love your TYPO3 blog. I published my first blog entry in 2006 on typo3blogger.de and I know that good blog entries cost a lot of effort, good investigation and a lot of writing skills. The blog entries on T3Planet fulfill all parts of good blog posts (many details, good layout…). Keep up the good work.

Good question. I don’t know that „TYPO3 was powered by PHP“ was a USP of TYPO3 in the beginning. I think I get in touch with PHP only 1-2 years before I used TYPO3. So TYPO3 was actually my PHP world in the beginning :) Since a few years I have also developed Symfony apps and use also other frameworks. Using a lot of different frameworks help developers to understand different solutions better and avoid the law of the hammer: "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

I think one successor is the backend/frontend split and the easy to handle backend user restriction. It is easy to manage a huge number of editors, with a website with thousands of pages. In the last 1-2 years I love the migration to the Symfony & PSR base in the core!

In the beginning it was Kasper (I love the Snowboard Tours!), but there are also a lot of other people I follow. Some of the more technical are Georg Ringer and Benni Mack, because they are also developers.

As extension author I always recommend to use open platforms instead of private E-Mail to communicate about TYPO3 and extensions, so others get the chance to answer or get the information as well. The best place for quick questions is TYPO3 slack and the different channels (Please never mention the complete channel :) ).

Yes. TYPO3 is very developer driven. All the other roles are always needed to push TYPO3 forward.

I love playing games in the garden ( https://360friends.de/7-besten-garten-spiele/ - German only) and meeting friends. If you know any cool games, please let me know. I am always looking for new ones...