Innovation via Initiatives

We’re very happy with the Initiative approach we’ve launched last year. Initiatives are the place where new concepts are evaluated, discussed and developed outside of the fixed roadmap for TYPO3 Core.

When they’re ready, they’re ready. If it makes sense to include results from an Initiative into TYPO3 core, it will be included. Initiatives have their own roadmap, their own timeline, and can exist as separate extensions or completely independent of the TYPO3 Core. Current hot topics within Initiatives are:

Dashboard Initiative

Richard Haeser from MaxServ is heading an approach for a Dashboard within TYPO3, bringing together lots of ideas from various other concepts built on User Experience Weeks or public extensions. The aim is to make life easier for editors on a day-to-day basis. Feel free to ping Richard for more information.

Persistence Initiative

Artus Kolanowski has done amazing research on how to bring GraphQL to TYPO3 with a proof of concept already in place. Working on new ways on how to deal with data will lead to some changes within TYPO3 Core for storing and retrieving data in a more consistent way. Oliver Hader is also researching a new permission concept for persisting data.

Progressive Web App Initiative

Tymoteusz Motylewski is working on a prototype on how data can be exposed from TYPO3 Core without having to render TypoScript-based Frontends, eventually resulting to a toolkit for building Progressive Web Apps. This initiative is still in its research phase.

Frontend Editing Initiative

Thanks to Pixelant, there is the “Frontend Editing” Extension in our public extension repository now, which people are already using in their projects since TYPO3 v8. However, we did not manage to include it in TYPO3 Core. Benjamin Kott will now take up the lead for re-evaluating the approach of Pixelant, especially with a smoother integration with Fluid templates and the Assets / Media Management, to push Pixelant’s extension even further - be sure to check out the extension from TER in the meantime.

Initiatives will likely update their current status independently from the Core development. If the results of an initiative will lead to separate packages / extensions in general, it is easier to build new functionality more quickly, instead of being bundled into TYPO3 Core’s Release Lifecycle.