[TYPO3-templavoila] TemplaVoilà maintenance support

[Jo Hasenau]

Dear Andreas.

Someone pointed me to this thread, since you are (again) spreading a lot
of FUD recently. So I would like to clarify some things once and for 
all, even
though people keep telling me to not feed the trolls.

I'm not going to discuss that any further, but just give some first hand
information, so people will know what is actually going on.

> As announced by Joey Themes will be probably quite costy in future
> so that former TV customers actually do not intend to switch to
> gridelements but rather stay with TV and than if this won't be
> continued leave TYPO3 at all.

As usual you are mixing up 3 different things here, which are

a) TemplaVoila, a templating solution that helps integrators to connect
existing HTML-Layouts with TYPO3 CMS via predefined XML structures for
pages and custom content elements.

b) Gridelements, a content structuring solution that helps TYPO3 users
to group their content elements within different containers, that can be
created the same way as the backend layouts of the core.

c) THEMES, a set of extensions that provides the base to easily create
or just use different standardized TYPO3 themes based on different
templating and structuring solutions.

You can install Gridelements completely without THEMES, so the possible
price for some of the upcoming themes does not matter at all for that
decision.

The first official THEMES base package has been made with Gridelements
and Bootstrap, is available completely free in the TER and can be used
to create as many Bootstrap theme packages as you like.

We even used the crowdfunding income to buy some unlimited design
licenses to be able to provide some nice looking themes for the TYPO3
community in the TER. Even though the original design was a commercial
one, the unlimited license gives us the option to relicense it and
create a new product, which again will be available for free.

Of course there will be other themes, that might use another licensing
concept, but they will have the usual prices as you might know them from
template monster, wrapbootstrap or other shops. So claiming that themes
will be "quite costly" is just plain wrong and misleading.

But of course you can create similar base packages with TemplaVoila,
Flux or whatever you prefer, since THEMES is just the umbrella
extension, providing the selector, the configurator and other useful stuff.

> With gridelements it is similar as the benefits are actually not
> those they proclaimed and again it needs a lot of custom work to
> adjust and keep up with their development and what most don't like is
> the fact that newest versions are often needed ie by themes but not
> available due to that crowdfunding stuff.

Actually you don't need any custom work to keep up with Gridelements
development, since the TSconfig and TypoScript setups still work the
same way as they did years ago. We just provided new features and fixed
problems with workspaces and the like, but the code is as backwards
compatible as possible.

There was just one breaking change between 4.5 and 6.0, but this was due
to the fact that we had to keep pace with the core development, which is
the reason why we are still providing 2 different versions for 4.5.x and
6.x.x

Latest versions have always been available in the official GIT
repository, so people have always been able to get what is necessary
i.e. for the THEMES Bootstrap base package. And something you might not
be aware of: Gridelements itself is NOT necessary at all to work with
THEMES, you just have to make sure to create your own themes then and
have them based on another solution for containers and grouping
elements. The introduction package for example is fully compatible to
THEMES (and can already be selected as a theme) and it uses zero
Gridelements, but a huge number of Backend Layouts for pages instead.

We used the crowdfunding campaign as a kind of voting, which is why we
waited for the end of the campaign before we started to develop the base
package that the majority of people had voted for.

But the crowdfunding never prevented Gridelements or THEMES being publicly
available. Actually it did just the contrary, since together with the
T3A budget and additional private sponsoring we had for Gridelements it
enabled Kay, Thomas and myself to invest more time into development and
writing documentation and it paid some license fees for nice looking
designs we are currently working on.

So again this is just plain wrong and misleading.

Therefor I kindly ask you to stop spreading completely wrong statements
about the development, the financing, the dependencies or the future
plans of Gridelements and THEMES, since you are not involved in any of
these actions at all, so most of your statements are totally unfounded.

For people who might read this, it is highly recommended to follow the
issue trackers, news tickers and twitter timelines to get information
about what is really happening.

Have a good night.

Joey

-- 
Diversity:
Die Kunst zusammen unabhängig zu denken
The art of thinking independently together.
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