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10 years of blogging with and about TYPO3

From TYPO3 7.6 to version 13. From HMENU snippets to extension development.

Published

Ten years ago to the day, I started this blog! Back then, it used a different domain. But it was bilingual from the start and based on the then freshly released TYPO3 7.6(!) LTS.

For the first of the two screenshots, I went to the trouble of installing an old version of the website via DDEV. Looking at the code from back then … *whistles* We've come a long way.

RealURL instead of routing in the core.
Symlink installation instead of Composer.
Install Tool instead of console commands.

But at least there was already a site package for templates and configurations!

Screenshot of the blog from 2018: The background is a dark blue-gray, with navigation elements in white text. The list of tutorials is on the left side of the page layout in a wider column. The first, most recent tutorial is highlighted with a large image. Its headline, description text, and other data are displayed in white on a red background. The following tutorials alternate between white and light gray backgrounds. On the right side, linked categories and tags are associated with the tutorials.
The first of three designs.
Screenshot with the second design from 2019: The name and all main navigation elements are displayed on a dark blue header at the top of the page. Non-active navigation elements are light blue, while active ones are white. A red line separates the header from the rest of the page, which now has a white background. The headings are set in a medium blue. The tutorials are listed vertically below a short introductory text. Each tutorial has a square illustration on the left-hand side.
I have kept the color combination of red, blue, and white over the years.

Overview

Launching the bilingual blog

The TYPO3 community has truly embraced the motto "Inspiring people to share". Many smart and supportive individuals share their knowledge and experiences through their own blogs, Slack, and other channels, or via talks at events.

I don’t like being on stage, so I stick to the written word. So in 2015, I also began to document some things for myself and others. In German, because the German-speaking community is just so large. And in English, so as not to exclude anyone.

I guess there's no better way to build knowledge than by working through a topic in two languages. Also, while translating, I frequently notice that a phrase isn't quite clear in the other language and can then improve it.

Change of topics through the years

I started with typical templating topics, such as creating navigations with TypoScript. The first few years also included recaps of TYPO3 events.

Somehow, I soon found myself specializing in long, comprehensive tutorials. From that time on, topics often included features in new TYPO3 versions, such as Routing for pages and plugins.
And the TYPO3 Form Framework. Eight tutorials on this topic were something I never planned, but it turned out that way. Forms actually don't take up much room in my daily work. But some questions about the Form Framework were asked repeatedly. For other tasks, new solutions emerged, which I then described again and, in some cases, rewrote the original article.

For a while, I have shared my personal highlights of new TYPO3 versions as news articles. In the last few years, it has been mainly release notes for new and updated extensions.

However, the number of new tutorials has decreased. Although there are many smaller solutions that I would also like to share, and I hope to do so in the future.

Demos, Demos, Demos

From the very beginning, practical examples have been important to me. Over time, this has resulted in a number of demo extensions for the Form Framework and other tutorials.

I keep all demos up to date for every TYPO3 version. Even the HMENU TypoScripts are still available, even though I switched to Fluid for navigation ages ago—as I'm sure you did too.

Learning from your own project

Back then, I deliberately chose TYPO3 as the technical foundation for this website so that I could use it as a playground for new features. I tried out many things here for the first time that later found their way into client projects.

I also applied frontend innovations such as CSS Custom Properties and Dark Mode here first.

Without a blog, there would be no extensions

What I realized while writing this retrospective: Without the blog, my public plugins and extensions would not exist. They were created because I wanted to meet my own requirements for this website.

I wrote the CKEditor plugin "linebreak" (CKE 4) and the TYPO3 extension "ckeditor_wordbreak" (CKE 5) because I needed the <wbr> tag in blog articles for line breaks in long URLs and file paths.

And since I absolutely wanted to use human-readable anchors in my tutorials, I ended up creating the "content_slug" extension.
This extension remains my favorite project. It gave me deep insights into TYPO3 and gradually helped me move from integrator to TYPO3 developer.

What does the future hold?

Just a few days ago, I published a tutorial on a CSS grid solution and realized how much I still enjoy writing and polishing articles. But I also remembered how much time it requires. I will probably focus on publishing a few shorter tutorials in the future.

I have also been wanting to create a "Projects" page for a while now. It would be a good opportunity to design a new, custom template for this subpage.
That said, I am still happy with the current website design, even though I would do many things differently today, of course.

This year, I also started developing a new personal website project, not with TYPO3 CMS, but for the first time using the static site generator Eleventy. We'll see when I can publish the first version. It seems like the Pareto principle is at work here. 😅

Here's to the next ten years! By then, we might also be celebrating TYPO3 version 20. Wouldn't that be fitting?

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