Three of our colleagues registered for the Certification Event and participated in the exam. Today we received word that all 3 passed the exam. As a result in the Arxia team there are 3 Certified TYPO3 Integrators. So our congratulations go to:

• Fleșer Alina
• Bodor László
• Militaru Tomiță

Arxia is as good as its people are, so that’s why we invest in trainings and certifications in order to be able to deliver quality services to our customers. Having three Certified TYPO3 Integrators is another important step and a guarantee of the quality of our work.

PlanningWiz dates from 2005 and over the years it has attracted tens of thousands of users. The room planer became the central point for a community that was forming around it, pretty much without our active involvement. We had to do something about it so we have spent last 4 months to offer our users a community website and all necessary tools to communicate with each other.

So if you haven’t planned your home or office space so far, you can start now at www.planningwiz.com – for free of course.

We hope you like it and will bookmark us .

Many thanks to the development team for their hard work in producing such a wonderful outcome.

Ramona Isai
Account Executive for PlanningWiz

The meetup started at 09.00AM with an opening speech by Daniel Homorodean , managing director of Arxia. He spoke about TYPO3, the community and the opportunities that are in front of the Romanian TYPO3 developers.

After his speech the next was Cornelia Iclanzan from Reea who presented TYPO3Gento, an innovative approach to combine TYPO3 and Magento for an online shop.

Following this presentation we could see another interesting presentation held by Ioana Cucuruzan (from Arobs) who presented as Apache Solr and its use in connection with a TYPO3 website.

Calin Borz (from Reea) has taken the spot before the coffee break presenting us a mobile website implementation with TYPO3 and TemplaVoila. His approach was quite interesting and many people were interested in learning more of this subject.

After the break Tiberiu Contiu from Arobs held a presentation about Test Driven Development, probably something that everyone was interested to see for a long time.

Continuing with the latest trends was Dan Homorodean from Arxia who introduced us to the concepts of FLOW3, things like Domain Driven Design, Dependency Injection and much more. He was followed by Horea Negru (also from Arxia) presenting Fluid, a new templating engine for TYPO3, one of the most powerful templating engines we’ve recently seen.

The last presentation was held by me (Bodor László – from Arxia) and it was about Extbase, more precisely “Introduction to Extbase”. This framework (if we can call it that) is the bridge between TYPO3 v4 and TYPO3 v5. The presentation certainly attracted some interest judging by the debate it followed after.

After the end of the presentation part, an open discussion about TYPO3 and the Romanian community followed which continued even at the lunch.

From 16.00 hours the first ever Official TYPO3 Certification event began, with 11 participants. Let’s hope that all of them will become Certified TYPO3 Integrators.

After the exam people went to Republic Pub and had couple of beers and discussed about TYPO3 and lots more.

With more then 35 participants this Usergroup Meetup was the largest TYPO3 event ever held in Romania and we think that it was at least as successful as the last one.

So now we can start preparing for the next meetup!

P.S.

The presentations will be available for download from the www.typo3romania.ro website.

Author: Bodor László

The event features the first ever TYPO3 Certification event in Romania, a good opportunity for developers to get certified by an official TYPO3 examiner from the TYPO3 Association.

Our colleagues Dan Homorodean, Horea Negru and László Bodor will be presenting some interesting subjects related to FLOW3 and Extbase, subjects that are becoming more and more important these days.

Schedule

Location: Hotel Royal Classic (Str. Liviu Rebreanu nr.39)

Date: Saturday 03 December 2011

Start: 09.00

09.00 – 09.10 Opening by Daniel Homorodean

09.10 – 09.50 TypoGento (Andreea Radu and Cornelia Iclanzan)

TypoGento is a service that connects TYPO3 to the Magento e-commerce applicaton

09.50 – 10.30 Apache Solr in TYPO3 (Ioana Cucuruzan)

This is the search engine you were looking for with special features such as faceted Search or Synonym Support, and incredibly fast response times of results within milliseconds.

The presentation is build around a working example of Apache Solr implemented within a Typo3 project.

10.30 – 11.10 Mobile Versions for TYPO3 websites (Calin Borz)

Implementing mobile versions for TYPO3 websites using TemplaVoila

11.10 – 11.40 Coffee break

11.40 – 12.20 Test Driven Development (Tiberiu Contiu)

TDD is a technique to approach software design bottom up along with zero regression. You write a test, you write the code to make it pass and then you refactor the code. The session shows an overview of TDD and talks about usefulness of implementing TDD as a standard in your team.

12.20 – 13.00 FLOW3 – reliable foundation for complex applications (Dan Homorodean and Horea Negru)

FLOW 3 responds to the need to have a full-stack PHP framework for creating complex applications that use advanced programming techniques and paradigms like Domain Driven Design, Dependency Injection, Aspect Oriented Programming. Fluid comes as a completion to this stack, being a powerful and extensible templating engine. The presentation describes the concepts and illustrates their implementation in FLOW3

13.00 – 13.40 – Introduction to Extbase programming (Bodor László)

Extbase offers a new way of building TYPO3 extensions for TYPO3 v4.x, a completely object oriented and a modern MVC approach that opens the path for the upcoming TYPO3 v.5 and FLOW3

13.40 – 14.30 – Open discussions

14.30 – 16.00 – Lunch break

16.00 – 18.00 TYPO3 Certification Exam

Those who didn’t register yet can still do it by sending an email to bodor [at] arxia [dot] com

We have a limited number of places left so we will give them away in order of receiving your registration emails

Hope to see you on saturday!

Please note!
The sessions will be held in romanian language.

In Cluj Napoca/Romania where Arxia’s headquarters are there will be also a release party and many team members will participate in what is poised to be the biggest TYPO3 release party ever in Romania! If you want to come is not too late. You can still sign up here

Location: Bistro Viena
Time: 20.00 LOCAL TIME
Organizer: TYPO3 Usergroup Romania

Some of the presentations will be in Romanian, some of them will be in English. The full list of presentations will be announced at a later date and those interested in making a presentation are required to send an email to bodor@arxia.com until the evening of 23 November 2011.

This Meetup will be also the first time that a TYPO3 Certification event takes place in Romania. The Certification Exam will be held at the event location at 14.00 hours by the official certification team of the TYPO3 Association. For more information on how can you take the exam head over to the certification website.

Where ?

The meetup and the certification will be held at the conference hall of the Royal Classic Hotel (str. Liviu Rebreanu nr.39 – Cluj Napoca, Romania). The starting hour is set at 09.30 though it can still be modified if needed.

Want to participate ?

You can attend for free but you still need to send an email because the number of seats is limited!

To participate in this meetup please send an email to bodor@arxia.com If you want to take the certification exam then please head over to the certification website and register there for the certification.

Arxia will be proudly supporting and sponsoring this event and several of the team members will be attending and some of them will also take the certification exam.

For more information on this meetup you can contact Bodor László (bodor@arxia.com) who will be glad to offer you more details on any question you might have.

While we were working in this camp with a reduced schedule we also had lots of other activities together. One of the most interesting ones was when we split up in 4 groups and went on a photo hunt mission. Each group had to take at least one picture of some predefined objective. For example one of the hardest objectives was to take a picture that symbolizes egoism. All the teams worked hard and we did made a few noteworthy pictures during this exercise, some of these can be seen in the photo album attached to this post.

Other common activities included making an egg fly or telling a story about yourself. But also individual personality tests were conducted and these had quite a success among the team members.

On Wednesday the team travelled to Baile Homorod (a local resort) where the majority of our colleagues went to horse riding. None of us ride a horse before but thanks to the staff of the Lobogo Panzio we managed quite reasonably in the saddle.

In the evenings people come together and some played Citadels for long hours, others played Poker and some were just having a beer and a pizza together with the colleagues.

The week ended with another trip to the Balu Adventure Park and to the Sfanta Ana crater lake near Tusnad Bai. Here we slept in tents in the camping site near the lake, made a campfire in the evening and talked late into the night. On the last day of our camp we visited the Mohos lake and then started our long trip back to Cluj Napoca.

Its safe to say that this was the most successful Arxia Camp to date with people having lots of fun and work together. Also this camp raises the bar for the next years and will be quite a challenge to find a location like this and to organize the camp. But challenge is the reason why we are here at Arxia!

And here are the photos:

		Arxia Camp–part II VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Post written by: Bodor László (Arxia TYPO3 Team)

What else we do ? We travel and visit tourist sights, we participate in teambuilding exercises and most important of all, we have lots of fun together as a team. This year the camp started with a short visit to Sighisoara – an UNESCO World Heritage Site, where the Medieval Festival was just starting in this unique still inhabited citadel of Europe.

Sunday on the 31th of July our team went to visit the Balu Adventure Park in Harghita Bai. We have climbed up into the trees and did several adventure routes of lower or higher difficulty but i think its safe to say that the highlight of the day was the tyrolean traverse over the blue lake. Well there is a lot to say but i will let the pictures tell the story.

		Arxia Camp 2011 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

And this is just the beginning, more to follow as we are just in the beginning of the camp.

Update: Click here for the second part

These version are maintenance and bugfix versions as several bugs and security vulnerabilities were discovered in the TYPO3 core. These issues were also announced yesterday after the new versions were available. It is common practice that once these issues are discovered by the Core Team they are fixed and then announced after the patch version is available.

Because bugs and security issues are discovered from time to time in every software package, it is strongly recommended that users keep their TYPO3 version and also 3rd party extensions up to date in order to avoid their server being compromised

Arxia offers its customers a complementary service for a monthly fee that will ensure that the TYPO3 version and the used extensions are updated as soon as a patch is available. More details about this service will be available in a separate posting on this blog. Until then you can contact us anytime for more information.

During our work with TYPO3 it became natural for us to give back some things to the community and to the TYPO3 association. Among our actions in this direction is the TYPO3 Romania Usergroup – which is supported and hosted by Arxia. This usergroup allows Romanian TYPO3 developers to interact with each other and to find information on subjects that matter to them.

Another step in this direction is that from July 2011 we are Silver members of the TYPO3 Association. We hope that by being members will be able to support the TYPO3 Association more and that our contribution helps the development of TYPO3 in becoming the most successful Enterprise CMS on the market.

On the long term Arxia is committed to use TYPO3 and to offer it as the main solution to most of the projects in the enterprise segment. This is why is very important for us that the TYPO3 project goes forward and evolves permanently. Everyday there are new challenges, new technologies and new security issues in the IT business and we hope that by supporting TYPO3 (and the Association) we will make it ready for these challenges for the years to come.