PHP Developer Day 2024 - Impressions & Learnings from webit!

After the Developer Days for Annett as Co-Lead of the TYPO3 UX team began on Wednesday with the annual meeting of the team leads, the starting signal for the rest of the community was Benni Mack's keynote on Thursday morning. The TYPO3 Project Lead talked about the future of the CMS and the innovations of the upcoming release of version 13 on October 15. He also posed the provocative question of whether a CMS like TYPO3 will be needed in the future with a focus on AI. His answer: Artificial intelligence is there to assist, but the difference will still be made by the people who use and develop TYPO3 on a daily basis.

After the keynote, Oliver Bartsch presented a series of new APIs and explained their usage and integration into existing systems. With these interfaces, we are able to extend and adapt TYPO3 according to customer needs. One highlight is the Hotkey API, which allows keyboard shortcuts to be assigned to various functions in the backend, making editorial work easier, and the Pageview Content Object API, which facilitates the work of integrators through faster rendering in the frontend. Oliver also mentioned that the web-optimized image format webP is now delivered by default and no longer needs to be generated laboriously, and that vector graphics can now be cropped natively in the TYPO3 backend. Finally, he demonstrated the new detailed status information that can be made visible via configuration in the page tree. With these and many other new features, TYPO3 offers more possibilities for editorial teams and makes their work easier.

This was followed by Benjamin Franzke's presentation of the latest TYPO3 feature: Site Sets. With this, settings and configurations can be grouped and saved in sets. These presets can be used, for example, in multisite architectures to apply them to new pages without having to reconfigure them each time. The feature improves the maintenance of a TYPO3 system and gradually eliminates outdated configuration methods.

This was followed by a report from Fabian Stein on the use of AI in customer projects and project development. He evaluated how important the topic is currently in the agency environment and what hurdles need to be overcome to be able to offer products developed with AI at all. Customers are generally interested, but undecided about specific use cases. According to Fabian, agencies must tell success stories and advise to educate customers and alleviate fears.

After the coffee break, our developer Annett decided to attend Alexander M. Turek's session titled Deep Dive into Symfony’s Injection Component. Dependency Injection is used daily in the development of extensions in the TYPO3 environment to correctly and automatically represent the dependencies of individual components in the source code. However, few know how this works in detail under the surface. We can now use the newly gained conceptual and technical understanding to optimize our work in this area.

Thursday evening was traditionally dominated by the Coding Night, which the gathered community used to work late into the night on improvements for TYPO3.

Annett's first session in the morning had the fitting title Little Gems in TYPO3 v13 and was held by Jigal van Hemert. He talked about many features of the upcoming version that did not make it into TYPO3's external communication due to space constraints. Integrators now have the ability to preconfigure fields and information for the download function via DownloadPresets. Additionally, non-functioning redirects can now be more easily identified through the Redirects module. With this presentation, the image of the improvements that the version will bring was completed for the developers present.

Benni Mack then held his second session at the TYPO3 Developer Days – this time on the topic of Language Overlay. Multilanguage handling as well as versioning and publishing with the Workspaces feature are known core components of TYPO3. He provided technical insights on how content links on pages across different languages and versions (publishing levels) are stored to provide a better understanding of data storage in TYPO3 in general. Benni also mentioned that there is still room for improvement in handling translations. Work is being done on this, but the exact technical solution has not been finalized yet.

The following session by Oliver Hader focused on the important topic of Cyber Security. The TYPO3 Security Team Lead presented a series of possible attack vectors and explained how security vulnerabilities can be avoided. Although he could only cover a fraction of this topic, he did a great job of raising awareness about how quickly security issues can arise and why it is so important to address them.

As always at the TYPO3 Developer Days, there was also the opportunity this time to take your eyes off the screen and relax. This was taken care of by the breathing coach Stefan Völker with some exercises. In the evening, the visitors spent time together in a relaxed atmosphere or followed the parallel Olympic Games with excitement.

The Saturday began with a review of the TYPO3 Surfcamp in Fuerteventura, which took place for the first time this year. It's not just about surfing there, but above all about preparing the TYPO3 next generation. Young developers have the opportunity to learn and improve their skills through tasks provided. This year, the practical use of the new feature Site Sets was the focus. Julia Miller, Suanne Moog, and Benjamin Franzke extensively reported on the experiences gained. The Surfcamp was so well received and successful that it will take place again in 2025.

The following session by Helmut Hummel dealt with the solution to a practical problem. Since the delivery of assets on a website has a significant impact on performance, for example, images should not always be delivered in the highest possible resolution, but should always be optimized for the currently used resolution. Hummel demonstrated the correct use of such responsive images and how they can be centrally configured to keep a website's loading time low.

In the early afternoon, the time had finally come: Our developer Annett held her own session on the topic of accessibility. She talked about why accessibility is an important issue in Germany and how upcoming legal regulations further support this. Additionally, she extensively discussed when a website is considered accessible using an example and how to test for it. This included describing a testing process and providing specific instructions based on the test results. Accessibility has always been an important topic for webit! and we are proud that our Annett was able to bring this to the audience at the TYPO3 Developer Days.

The community used the last evening of the convention for a big social event to network over drinks and buffet and to exchange thoughts on the exciting input of the last three days. And just like the community, we are already counting the days until the TYPO3 Developer Days 2025.