After the big success of the first conference about TYPO3 Flow in 2012, this years conference “Inspiring Flow” tried to bring the conference to a new level: an international audience, two days of talks accompanied by two days of workshops before and after the conference. What remains from last year are great talks, the support of the TYPO3 Flow Core Team, very tasty food and the awesome location in the industrial heritage “Kesselhaus” in the small town Kolbermoor near Rosenheim in Germany. This year roughly 170 participants from nine countries attended the conference. The majority of attendants is already part of the TYPO3 community but this year already six persons came only because of their interest in the TYPO3 Flow framework (which is an increase by 600% compared to last year).
The conference started with a keynote by Ben van’t Ende, the TYPO3 community manager, and Robert Lemke, head of the Flow Core Team. Among other things, Ben reported on the CeBIT CMS Garden, where all major open source Content Management Systems presented themselves in one place.
Robert presented some of the improvements and new features in TYPO3 Flow 2.0 which is just around the corner. Afterwards he talked about the problems with the funding of patches and reviews. The funding of new features is relatively easy which was for example proven with the crowfunding of the safe request feature without CSRF tokens. But for patches and reviews it’s much harder to motivate contributors. So he asked the community for support of active contributors.
Another way to support the team is by spreading the word about the Flow spirit whose key values are humility, respect, trust and responsibility among many others. By communicating these values, contributors can act intuitively.
As an outlook into the future Robert mentioned semantic versioning and releases when features are ready, not at fixed dates. I hope that this approach won’t delay the release of a market-ready version of TYPO3 Neos too much.
Flow 2.1 might bring cloud resources, minification & filters and REST. For Flow 2.2 it is planned to integrate a page cache, a reverse proxy and multi persistence.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/robertlemke/inspiring-flow13-keynote
Using document databases with TYPO3 Flow (Karsten Dambekalns)
In his talk Karsten Dambekalns showed how it is possible to use a document (NoSQL) database to persist data in Flow. Currently only CouchDB is supported. But in the future TYPO3 Flow will support multiple persistence backends in parallel, for example of the same type (2 MySQL and 1 PostgreSQL) databases or of different types (MySQL and MongoDB)
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/kfish/using-document-databases-with-typo3-flow
Ember.js and Flow – how do they fit together? (Rens Admiraal)
Ember.js is a framework for building ambitious web applications. It is for example used for single-page apps. Rens Admiraal explained in his talk that TYPO3 Flow and Ember.js use MVC patterns, but define them completely different. Afterwards he showed how both frameworks can be used together and gave some helpful hints on debugging and logging. Some real life examples or a demo would have been a nice addition to this talk.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/radmiraal/typo3-flow-and-ember
medialib.tv, building VOD portal with the flow (Dominique Feyer)
medialib.tv is a multi domain video on demand (VOD) portal build with TYPO3 Flow. The project had a very tight development period and was the first TYPO3 Flow project done by Dominique Feyer. For him it was the right decision to choose TYPO3 Flow. In his talk he explained his approach to TYPO3 Flow and how he realized the project.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/dfeyer/building-a-vod-portal-with-the-flow
A fully integrated single sign-on solution with TYPO3 Flow (Christopher Hlubek)
After explaining the differences between sign-in, sign-on, authentication and authorization Christopher Hlubek pointed out why they developed a new single sign-on solution instead of using already existing solutions like SAML 2.0, Shibboleth, OpenID or OAuth. The project needs some final polishing before being ready for public use.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/hlubek/single-sign-on-with-typo3-flow
A complete TYPO3.Flow Development and Deployment Pipeline (Thomas Layh)
Starting with the question, what a developer needs to be happy, Thomas Layh showed how they use Vagrant to set up development environments. With the new Vagrant installer this process is much easier now. For the continous delivery they use the CI server Jenkins. The deployment is done with TYPO3 Surf.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/tlayh/a-complete-typo3flow-development-and-deployment-pipeline
Embedded Expression Language (EEL) and TypoScript outside of TYPO3 (Christian Müller)
TypoScript is used in TYPO3 CMS to configure output in a flexible way. It was revised for TYPO3 Flow and Neos and the Embedded Expression Language was added which is especially suited to work on data like content from a content repository. Together they provide powerful tools that can be utilized outside of a CMS as well. Unfortunately there are very few real world projects that make use of these techniques so the creators hope that this will change soon.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/kitsunet/typo-scriptandeel
More insights can be found in the slides of the workshop by Bastian Waidelich and Christian Müller which was done the day before the conference: http://kitsunet.github.io/Slides.Neos-Technologies-In-Flow-Applications/
Maintaining your Flow / Neos installation – best practices for the use of composer, git and friends (Christian Jul Jensen)
Christian Jul Jensen, better know to the community as Julle, explained how to use Composer with TYPO3 Flow projects, how to use it in a team and how to prevent some pitfalls. If you have problems updating to Flow 2.0 with composer support this link might be helpful: http://bit.ly/helpmeicantupdateflow
Keynote: A Framework is No Architecture (Stefan Priebsch)
The second conference day was started with a keynote by Stefan Priebsch, who is well know in the PHP community. His talk was about the MVC pattern and very entertaining since he did a live performance of the MVC pattern together with some (more or less) volunteers from the audience. The conclusion of his talk was that we should keep in mind, that MVC was primarily developed for GUI applications. But on the web, the view is remote and not handled by the server.
How Flow influenced TYPO3 CMS (Felix Oertel)
A lot of features that have been developed for TYPO3 Flow have been backported or adapted for TYPO3 CMS. In his talk, Felix Oertel presented some of these features. For Extbase and Fluid he showed code snippets how it was done in the old fashioned way and now.
Other features that have been introduced or influenced by TYPO3 Flow are Namespaces, XLIFF. The other mentioned features like Surf for TYPO3 CMS or SOAP aren’t official features that ship with TYPO3 CMS.
Unfortunately the talk lacked to mention that there are some more things that have found it’s way into TYPO3 CMS like the caching framework.
Slides: http://foertel.com/inspired-by-flow/
Flow Applications (Stefan Regniet)
In his talk Stefan Regniet presented some of the TYPO3 Flow applications they developed, for example Solr search for TYPO3 Neos, a location based ride service with push notifications for smartphones, a TYPO3 Flow based Kanban board which was a test project or the Inspiring Flow Conference website which was done with TYPO3 Neos.
With the NEOS knowledgebase they started a community website to collect all kind of information around TYPO3 Neos.
Using TYPO3 Surf, Git and Jenkins for scalable deployment architectures (Martin Helmich)
Martin Helmich presented another approach on how to deploy TYPO3 Flow projects. He mentioned the steps they have taken until they came to the shown solution. The presented solution is able to update serveral nodes in parallel and performing a rollback in case of a broken build.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/mhelmich/scalable-deployment-architectures-with-typo3-surf-git-and-jenkins
Flow package best practices (Pankaj Lele)
After having done some TYPO3 Flow projects, Pankaj Lele explained the lessons he learned from them. His talk was divided into hints about architecture and coding. Due to the fact that he presented 45 best practices his talk was very packed and he had to go through the slides very fast. Nevertheless the talk gave much useful hints.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/pankajlele/flow-packagebestpractices
Lightning Talks and Q & A Session
Actually a presentation by Michael Klapper about “Setup development environment with Vagrant, Chef and github + Travis-ci” was planned at this point. But due to illness of the speaker the topic has to be switched to lightning talks and a Q&A session.
Karsten Dambekalns did a short talk about Profiling TYPO3 Flow Applications with Plumber and PhpProfiler.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/kfish/profiling-typo3-flow-applications
Afterwards Felix Oertel showed how to use Flow to bridge TYPO3 CMS into (various) backends with SOAP and REST.
For the Q&A session all members of the TYPO3 Flow core team that were present at the conference gathered on stage. Unfortunately there was only one question about the marketing plans to promote the TYPO3 Flow project. Therefore the Q&A session ended very quickly.
The Real World –Beyond the Blog Example (Robert Lemke)
The conference ended with a talk by Robert Lemke on many advanced topics that developers may encounter when they dig more deeply into TYPO3 Flow. Furthermore he gave some insights into features of TYPO3 Flow 2.0.
Slides: http://de.slideshare.net/robertlemke/beyond-theblogexample
Best talk award
All visitors of the conference were asked to rate the talks. Stefan Priebsch and his talk about the MVC pattern was best rated. Christopher Hlubek and his talk about a TYPO3 single sign-on solution was the best talk done by the community.
Social Event
The conference was accompanied by a social event after the first conference day. After a very tasty flying buffet Robert and Karsten had again the honor to cut the first piece from the TYPO3 Flow cake. Afterwards the event moved to the Kellergewölbe where the party continued. The mood was excellent and people enjoyed the party as well as the whole conference very much.
Conclusion
TYPO3 Flow has really arrived in real world projects. It is used for large scale projects and due to the fact that many talks revolved around deployment I think the acceptance of TYPO3 Flow raised much since last year.
This awesome conference was made possible by many sponsors and the hard working team of TechDivision. Thanks a lot!
I’ve linked all slides that I’m aware of in my article. More media can be found on the official conference website. Videos from the conference and the talks will follow in a couple of days.
