[TYPO3-dev] TYPO3 6.2 experiences

[Christian Reiter]

Hi,

After the long and finally successful effort to get 6.2 out I want to 
give some (subjective) feedback.

I think it's important to see what an enormous continuity and security 
of investment you can get for old projects with the new 6.2 LTS version.

As an example I will list three things I am dealing with:

1)
  A large multidomain multilanguage website made originally in 2006 with 
Typo3 4.0 with all the "classics" templavoila, tt_news, tt_address, many 
custom plugins, Xclasses, static filecache et etc

2)
A large multidomain website made originally in 2004 with TYPO3 3.6 
(after a pilot project with 3.5), mostly custom pibase extensions

3)
A content-staging extension where TYPO3 BE users can send individual 
pages through a simple lifecycle and publish them along with all 
relations, references and files from a separate stage TYPO3 installation 
to a production installation, running also since 2004 on several installs

Short summary:

It basically all works after manageable updates.

This means that with 6.2 LTS supported till 2017 a project built in 2004 
will have at least 13 years of return on the original investment without 
having to rebuild the infrastructure, export/import content, etc.

This is great.

I think it's a pretty good investment in terms of IT infrastructure when 
a Web CMS framework can run for >10 years without either starting from 
scratch or being hopelessly outdated.
6.2 gets rid of "hopelessly outdated" for the core, and extensions can 
of course be replaced gradually.

Somewhat longer summary:

I found the greatest part of the work was cleaning up the original 
installs of old projects.

Once you got to the point where you had a "almost perfect 4.5" with no 
more deprecations, no more extensions that were unneeded or broken 
already in 4.5 etc, no ore typoscript or features that were known to be 
questionable (e.g. PHP_SCRIPT nonsense) the upgrade was pretty 
straightforward.

Smoothmigration fixes, follow the install tool, adapt things that can't 
be done automatically (port custom DAM plugins to FAL etc), fix a number 
of backend modules that don't get along with the new moduleURLs, etc.

Most of the fixes where "summary" (search+ replace).

The old 3.6 installation is actually easier because it is almost all 
simple pibase plugins.

The staging extension needs to learn about sys_file_metadata and 
sys_file<->category relations (basic FAL support was there for 6.0)

Since I started first tests with earlier betas there were some painful 
moments but those areas have been recognized and mostly patched/improved

* FAL problems with many basic functions being broken/unreliable (still 
not properly solved is in my opinion 
http://forge.typo3.org/issues/46020, I am running scripts to fix that 
currently)

* TYPO3 6.2 constantly destroying itself through the caching mechanism 
(locking problems) - this made the early betas almost unusable (and 
don't even think about running on windows ;) but has greatly improved now

* Performance...

One point of possible improvement might be that the system generally 
tends to throw exceptions and crash the site in some instances that 
could be recoverable errors.

So, big kudos to the TYPO3 team for the work on 6.2 and the LTS concept.

Greetings,

Christian