Contao news

On January 29th and 30th, 2010, the TYPOlight team met in Munich to discuss the status quo and the future development of the project. Key issues were to define the target audience of the system and the direction in which TYPOlight will evolve.

A tool for webmasters

TYPOlight is a "tool for webmasters" and shall provide the technical basis for their work. Due to the detailed permission system, the CMS is suitable for personal websites as well as for big projects involving several editors, employees or designers who work collaboratively. The difference between TYPOlight and a classic website builder is that the acutal web design process (layout creation) is explicitly part of the workflow and shall not be abstracted.

A "webmaster" according to our definition has good knowledge of HTML and CSS as well as basic knowledge of websites in general (hosting, domains, FTP, file permissions etc.). Optional object-oriented PHP programming skills are helpful to understand the technical background and to customize or extend the system. If you fulfill these qualifications, you get a CMS that

• is technically up to date,
• generates Standards-compliant (X)HTML code,
• is suitable to create accessible websites,
• can be installed on shared hosting servers,
• supports collaboration with different permissions,
• requires less resources than comparable CMS and
• can easily be customized or extended.

Mobile and Social Web

Mobile Web (websites for mobile devices) and Social Web (Facebook, Twitter etc.) are two important trends that have changed and are still changing the Internet. We want to address these changes in TYPOlight and adjust the system to the new requirements. Here are some possible features:

• Allow to create separate style sheets for mobile devices (including iPhone)
• Allow to create a separate "mobile version" of the website in the site structure
• Extend content elements to be displayed only on mobile devices
• Automatically publish news/events on Twitter, Facebook etc.
• Allow to add news/events using an iPhone app or via e-mail
• Provide an interface (XML-RPC or SOAP) to create contents externally

I expect the new features to be integrated into the TYPOlight core in the next minor version (2.9).

Different usage scenarios

"Learning by doing" is still one of the most effective ways to familiarize with a new system. The example website currently distributed with the TYPOlight core ("Music Academy") shows how to use the CMS for an educational website. Additional example websites could show TYPOlight in different usage scenarios:

• TYPOlight as a blog
• TYPOlight as an event portal
• TYPOlight for companies
• TYPOlight for photographers
• TYPOlight for …

It is essential that the user chooses the template according to the purpose of the website and thus gets the structures and modules which are typically required for his type of website. Besides an explanation of the system and the used resources, the example website could then also be the basis of the real website.

Regarding the creation of the example websites, we count on the help of the community, which has been discussing free templates lately. If you are interested in developing a theme for the core, please contact us.

PR and networking

Apart from the technical development of the system and the continuous expansion of the community, we also want to increase the awareness of TYPOlight, overcome prejudice and gain new users. This does not only include further increase of the online presence in blogs or databases like wikipedia, but also intensification of journalist, developer and user contacts on exhibitions such as the OpenExpo or the "Linuxtag".

To put this plan into action, we will depend on the help of the TYPOlight partners and the TYPOlight community, especially outside of Germany. Whereas there will be 4 german books and 2 video trainings by the end of 2010, the project has not even been mentioned in international CMS and PHP magazines yet. We greatly appreciate any offer, contact or tipp in this matter.

Unofficial TYPOlight meetings

Thanks to the engagement of our community, casual local TYPOlight meetings, where interested users can exchange experiences, have been established in Germany, Switzerland and Austria during the last months. A user meeting in the United Kingdom is scheduled for March, 2010.

We are very happy about this development and invite all (potential) users to join in.