In what seemed like a significant milestone for TYPO3 in the United Kingdom, the Open Source CMS held its first ever TYPO3 Camp in the country this month in London. We met representatives from TYPO3 agencies around the UK and Europe and heard an assortment of technical and conceptual talks. And like all the best tech events it started with a pub social the night before and ended with dinner and a rooftop cocktail bar.
Tom Warwick opened the event with a nostalgic look back at his own history with TYPO3 in particular working with Gwent Police in the 2010s. I think developers are often rushing from heads down in one task to the next and I for one don’t take nearly enough opportunity to look back over my successes and the bigger picture, so I found his happy memories of keeping his sites online during an Anonymous denial of service attack or tracking Barack Obama’s convoy for the 2014 NATO Summit in Newport thoroughly enjoyable.
Benni Mack compared the cost of TYPO3 with a range of proprietary CMSes and pitched for Open Source more generally as a long term investment in people instead of investing in somebody else’s profit margin.
Regular TYPO3 speaker Martin Helmich of Mittwald covered many technical details of hosting TYPO3 in the cloud. We host exclusively on our own equipment at enterprise data centres inside the United Kingdom but this still had relevance thanks to a detailed look at different approaches to multiserver caching, database replication, and file storage. We use Galera and Gluster for our redundant hosting but I’ll follow this up by investigating RustFS and Ceph as alternatives to Gluster which hasn’t performed as well as we would have liked.
Owen Priestley from UK agency Liquid Light gave useful insights on positioning TYPO3 in the UK market by embracing its niche positioning and leaning on its enterprise, security, privacy, and performance features. We’ve found the platform scales and does multi-site excellently compared to competing products and has less vulnerable dependencies on plugins to achieve a basic featureset so this resonated well.
Ruth Cheesley introduced us to Mautic, an Open Source self hosted marketing automation platform that looks really powerful and I’ll be attending the online conference next week to find out more.
Mathias Bolt Lesniak covered interesting developments in getting new developers up to speed working with the platform using the new onboarding curriculum. This is a big step in the right direction although it feels perhaps a little unfinished and personally I’d love to see it accompanied by more detailed tutorials allowing juniors to actually follow the curriculum online or pay for training provided by the TYPO3 Association.
Daniel Fau showed how TYPO3 powers government websites across Germany thanks to version 11 of the Government Site Builder. We’ll be looking at this Open Source project for inspiration on best practices to follow in our own TYPO3 builds.
In the gaps in between there were scones and cream, Welsh cakes, salads and sandwiches. That MSQ’s offices hosting the event had a fancy coffee and hot chocolate machine delighted Gary and Dalton who have been pressing for one at Prater Raines HQ for some time.
We especially enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with friends from the community on our home soil. It was a particular pleasure for me to see András Ottó as his travel was funded thanks to my TYPO3 Kudos nomination in Karlsruhe earlier this year.