Real-World Solutions for Developing High-Quality PHP Frameworks and Applications

Chapter 3. TYPO3: The Agile Future of a Ponderous Project

Robert Lemke and Karsten Dambekalns

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• The history of TYPO3

• Principles and methods for the TYPO3 project

• Practical application of principles and methods

• Test scenario problems and solutions

INTRODUCTION

When we started the development of TYPO3 v5, quite a few people were astonished by the courage or—depending on the point of view—foolishness behind the project. After all, we were about to start over new after more than 10 years.

The History of TYPO3: Thirteen Years in Thirteen Paragraphs

In fall 1997, Kasper Skårhøj started to gather requirements for a system to allow his customers to update the content of their websites without influencing the design; the term content management was basically unknown at the time.

In spring 1998, Kasper wrote three prototypes that were more and more powerful and built up know-how. In summer of that year, the development was being commercialized under the hood of the Superfish.com brand. Strategic goals were defined and by the end of the year, Superfish.com teamed up with Saatchi & Saatchi.

In early 1999, another version of the TYPO3 kernel was written from scratch. Nobody suspected that this kernel would last for the next 10 years. During the course of the year, it became evident that Superfish.com headed in another direction, so Kasper Skårhøj left the company. By mutual agreement, he was allowed to keep all rights to TYPO3 to further develop the project on his own. To bring the ...