[TYPO3-dev] FLOW3 / TYPO3 5.0

[Michael Sauter]

Hi,

thanks for your answer, Robert!
I came to this list also via the "hint" and want to share my opinion as 
someone from the "outside" (which means: I haven't done much TYPO3 v4 
work till now).

> And why do we need all this fancy buzz-word stuff? Isn't a bit of MVC
> and using Smarty for templates enough?
>
> Our mission is to build a "future-proof" CMS with an "enterprise-ready"
> extension API. This means that we must simplify development of complex
> applications for professionals. You don't learn OOP or test-driven
> development over night, that's true. But for the professional developers
> that we are (in the community), it's worth the hassle. From the feedback
> we got so far, it turned out that many PHP developers were really
> inspired by reading the books we recommended and experienced a real
> boost for their work as a PHP developer.

So true, I learned more about PHP in the last months since I'm looking 
at FLOW3 and reading the books than in the years before.

> I guess a mistake we made was giving the framework a name too early.
> People tend to think that TYPO3 Phoenix and FLOW3 are distinct projects.
> "We don't need FLOW3, we want TYPO3 5.0". But FLOW3 is 80% of TYPO3.
>
> FLOW3 is not hard to learn. In fact it's easier to learn for complete
> newbies than for experienced PHP developers. This is a principal
> problem: OOP is hard to learn for people who are used to create
> procedural code. The DDD approach is very intuitive and the naming and
> structure conventions are so consistent like in no second framework I
> know. FLOW3 does make use of a different way to develop, an agile way.
> And for sure, that takes quite some effort to get used to. But this is a
> decision we took - we want the TYPO3 community to learn and be
> competitive for today's and tomorrow's development practice. Although
> this means that we'll leave some people behind, it's our chance to stay
> on the market in the future.

Yes, and I believe it will attract a lot of people to TYPO3 (like me). 
Everywhere I look, people complain about TYPO3 as being old-fashioned 
(and rightly so). I hated it for years (both for usability and code) and 
still use v4 only if I really have to.
TYPO3 only caught my attention again in October 2009 because with FLOW3, 
you're really trying to make it better. For example, I've worked with 
Drupal, and they're stuck (just look at their plans for the version 8 
(and 7 is not even on the market) - no word of tackling the real 
problems for developers). And believe me, people will eventually switch 
to something else. I've seen it, and people are likely to switch to good 
frameworks which help them build a custom CMS in the same time they 
would need to customize the CMS (Django for example).

So, I'm betting on the future with v5/FLOW3. I've never seen something 
similar to FLOW3 in the PHP world in terms of ambition and quality (from 
a developer point of view). I'm not 100% sure if it will work out, but 
it's by far the best try (and worth of trying).

> We will have our first release of TYPO3 Phoenix on Friday 14th of May.
> And the second release will be on June 11th. It'll have a small visible
> feature set which grows from sprint to sprint. You are highly encouraged
> to follow our sprints at http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/typo3-v5 !
>
> I can imagine that, as soon as we release the first sprint release,
> people will grumble "so that's 5.0?". That's why we'll label the
> releases "TYPO3 Phoenix Sprint Release 1, 2, 3..." etc. However, this
> will be a truly usable solution after the first few releases. But it
> won't have the visible feature set yet you might hope 5.0 will have.

I'm really exited! No matter what the result will be. At least it will 
be possible to see visible progress on the CMS. And I hope it will 
people help to believe in v5.

Keep up the good work!
~michael