So, i just came back from Eindhoven, The Netherlands where this years edition of the TYPO3 Developer Days was held. This was the biggest TYPO3 event i ever attended. Met a lot of new people and also some of the people I’ve previously met in Mallorca, Inspiring Conference and of course last years T3EE.
I will not go into too much details about the workshops.I attended mostly those that were of special interest to me. That is the THEMES workshop because of the concept that i was always interested in – creating interchangeable themes for your TYPO3 website. Someone offered even to create an on the fly theme downloader which could directly download the theme into your TYPO3 installation and have a new theme which you can switch with a button. Combine this with Distributions and you will have a killer feature that will be appealing for everyone and especially to those who are not so experienced with TYPO3 or those coming from “other worlds” (like WordPress). I’m already planning to create a theme of my own based on a Bootstrap template.
Lately I’ve been also working more and more with TYPO3 Flow so I went to the Flow and Neos workshops. Overall the workshops were interesting and you could learn some things. The best thing is that you can ask the developers directly if you have questions about some feature or issue. One thing i didn’t understand exactly is why they are switching issue tracking to Jira, after all being part of the open source community we should embrace open-source and not some proprietary system whenever is possible. However this is their decision and in the end if it helps TYPO3 to advance faster and better then we should embrace it.
Regarding the organizers of the event, I think they did a very good job, I know it’s never easy to organize such an event, especially with so many different people with different backgrounds and different cultures. It was very well organized and the location – the TechniekHuys was excellent with nice and big rooms, some of the screens could have been bigger but it was nothing that we couldn’t live without.
The social event gave me the opportunity to meet some nice people and change opinions about the event, the TYPO3 family of products and last but not least the Netherlands – the host country of this event.
As an added bonus I also did got my hand on some TYPO3 stickers and branded my laptop. I would have loved some orange stickers but they didn’t have that color. Suggestion: events should sell loads of stickers and other TYPO3 branded stuff.
Too bad of the Sunday early morning plane, we had to leave early and couldn’t stay until the end. I’ve learned on Twitter that next year the T3DD will be in Nuremberg, Germany. I hope I will be there, until then maybe we see each other in Mallorca and T3EE. A big thanks again for the organizers and the sponsors of the T3DD14!
Laszlo Bodor
