Impression of T3CON07

By: Ben van 't Ende & Sander Vogels

Lars Houmark - photo Erik Svendsen

Last week the third International TYPO3 Conference was held at Karlsruhe. Maybe for the last time at this location. There's some pro's and con's for Karlsruhe so it's being thinked over. The weather during the conference was simply excellent and in the course of the conference the temperatures were rising parallel to the spirit of many.

The conference was sold out and really gave the pay-off one would expect from the largest international TYPO3 event. According to many attendees the quality of talks and the professionalism of those who attended was plainly unrivaled by the first two editions. Also the atmosphere during the conference was so great that it made some of the old community members  have deja-vu's of the first snowboard tours, when the basis was formed of what now has become one of the most successful open source communities. Technical excellence and the will to improve the project still goes hand in hand with an extended family feeling. Some highlights of T3CON07:

Thursday

This day was filled with tutorials and did not see that many attendants yet. The greater bunch were due to arrive on Friday morning for Kasper's keynote.  The Thursday is the prelude to the official conference. It is traditionally reserved for tutorials and always has the character of something like a TYPO3 University. It's technical talks on a high level of expertise served to a die hard TYPO3 crowd. The TYPO3 Commerce tutorial was excellent and will have many people start really using TYPO3 Commerce. Tim Wentzlau's tutorial on the DB App Builder showed how he uses the kick starter to, more or less intuitively, build an extension without any PHP knowledge. Front-end support included! At the end of the day there was sponsored tropical drinks for all.

Friday

Juergen Egeling officially opened the conference and after that it was time for Kasper's keynote. Kasper gave a short summary of what developing TYPO3 had meant for him in his daily life and how he stepped away from what he considered to be arrogance. Kasper's urged everyone to embrace TYPO3 5.0 in his conclusion. Nobody should be scared of the future and be open for the fantastic possibilities the new framework embodies. As a special surprise TYPO3 branded apples were handed out to attendants of the keynote. After the coffee break the talks started. A few highlights of the day were the talk about TYPO3 5.0 by Robert Lemke/Daniel Hinderink and the talk of Lars Houmark about extension hacking which made some people a little bit nervous. But in fact this was a beautiful example of the kind of issues the TYPO3 Security Team has to tackle day today. As one of the most active members in all TYPO3 teams it was applauded by many Lars's talk was awarded best paper on Saturday. Lars thanked Henning Pingel for great preparations of the talk. The day ended with an excellent dinner accompanied by Free Beer.

Saturday

Saturday showed a slow start as Friday night seemed longer than usual to more than a few. Some highlights of this day. TYPO3 development by Robert Lemke/Karsten Dambekalns (awarded second best paper), ICE pack by Joey Hasenau and TYPO3 4.2 by Ingo Renner. Joey introduced the dress code for the next TYPO3 conferences, orange shirt/green tie, which is of course totally in line with TYPO3's corporate identity! Ingo showed some very promising screens of what TYPO3 4.2 is going to look like. The focus of the whole 4.x range is on usability but 4.2 definitely is going to blow away some people. Many back-end users will be surprised to see the rearranged, cleaned up back-end that will be a pleasure to work with. The conference ended with the Best Paper Award after which Juergen officially ended the conference.
On Saturday evening many had a spontaneous after party at Wolf Brauerei to relax after a very informative conference. The mix of technical in depth talks, business cases, lots of networking in a ambiance of brotherhood, seems to work stronger every conference. Next year the event will become a little bigger and will move to another town. But the 2007 edition will be remembered by many as one of the best.

A big thank you goes out to the Punkt team and especially Juergen Egeling for great organisation! We also thank all speakers and all visitors for making this a great event. See ya next year in ..........;-)