Roadmap to TYPO3 4.2

By: Ingo Renner

The TYPO3 Core Team is proud to announce the roadmap for the upcoming 4.2 release of the TYPO3 Enterprise Content Managment System.

After some time went by since the get together of the Core Team at T3DD07 and the release of TYPO3 4.1 we'd like to introduce you to the plans for TYPO3 4.2.

As a result of an open brainstorming session at T3DD07, the ideas of the Core Team members, and some left overs from previous releases the roadmap has been put together with the most important changes as follows:

• UTF-8 as default for new installations
• Drop of PHP4 support, TYPO3 4.2 will have a minimum requirement of PHP5.2, please prepare your servers
• A rewritten Installer and Setup Module
• A TYPOscript editor with syntax highlighting
• Improvements for css_styled_content focusing on the file and multimedia content elements
• A rewritten, AJAX powered form wizard
• Improvements to the page tree with a live search filter
• IRRE improvements targeting f.e. localization support
• like always performance improvements for the front and back end

A rough timeline has been set with a final release planed for the end of the year. Nevertheless please don't consider the shown dates as fixed. The final release might also get pushed back to early 2008. The dates shown are especially meant as an orientation for developers, contributors, and sponsors.

A sponsoring system is planed to get set up to donate for the features planed.

As shown in the roadmap, starting with TYPO3 4.2 the TYPO3 Core Team also introduces a new release scheme. We will start of with releasing alpha versions which we didn't have had in the past. Consider the alpha releases being the beta releases in former development branches. The feature freeze will happen at the end of the alpha cycle during which features can be added. Then the beta releases will contain bug fixes only before moving to release candidates and the final release. Nevertheless you can checkout the latest code from the SVN trunk at any time.

We'd also like to encourage you to test all the pre final releases as much as possible, getting feedback is essential to ensure the quality of the new features. If you're e.g. using one of the new features in a project of yours already and discover bugs, please report them immediately to http://bugs.typo3.org/!

For more information on the status of TYPO3 4.2 projects, see the 4.2 development wiki page.