Version 13 and Editor Widgets: TYPO3 Meetup HH
Lots of people, exciting topics, long day - great event! Around 50 enthusiasts took part in the TYPO3 Meetup at sitegeist media solutions GmbH in Hamburg to discuss the latest news from the TYPO3 universe.
Doors Open from 6.30 pm and the place was quickly packed with TYPO3 enthusiasts and many veterans - including from the Core Developer Team. No wonder: word quickly got around in the community that none other than TYPO3 CTO Frank Nägler would be announcing news about version 13 - just under six months before the release of the LTS version. In a nutshell, we can all look forward to the 13th edition of CMS: TYPO3 will be leaner, faster, more user-friendly and, above all, more international. For example, Backend can be operated completely from right to left.
Lots of helpful information for editors
After a pizza break, Ulrich Mathes, Backend developer at sitegeist, focused on the editors. A type of person who likes to despair at the many buttons in TYPO3-Backend and cannot find their way around the help because the help texts are primarily addressed to developers. This became particularly obvious in our day-to-day project work with the editors of our customer SPIEGEL Verlag. With a whole bouquet of measures, improvements were made here in many places. For example, a separate "wiki" was created, which ranges from simple questions (What is TYPO3?) to the creation of pages and elements - with many screenshots and in simple language. In addition, many functions in Backend have been disabled by code, so that editors can no longer maintain images in the RTE or set fixed widths for images.
Slides from Ulli Mathes on Speaker Deck:
And then something with "AI"
It goes without saying that the topic of "AI" should not be missing from a TYPO3 Meetup. We at sitegeist have been working intensively with artificial intelligence since 2023, be it in the form of generative AI or support in programming or the optimization of back-office and analysis processes.
In an interactive format, we wanted to find out together what the situation is with "TYPO3 and AI". For example, there are a number of extensions that connect TYPO3-Backend with Chat GPT via API to automatically create texts, titles or descriptions and support editors in their work. However, the discussion went much further and deeper and focused on the content itself. Will I write content for AI in the future? And can I still reach my target group with the content on my site? The topic is definitely interesting and is still under observation.
Conclusion
It was a great meetup with lots of ideas that we are now following up on. It was also great to see how the people who work with TYPO3 are coming more into focus and how much is still feasible and possible to simplify working with TYPO3 and increase acceptance. We will therefore remain in close contact with the community and will see you at sitegeist for the official release party in October at the latest.
Thanks to Louisa Engel for the great organization and the introductory words. Thanks also to the back office team for their support!
