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.

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.

Another great improvement is the revised Rich Text Editor which now completely relies on ExtJS allowing a much smoother and faster functioning of the editor.

Of course there are many other improvements aimed mainly for developers: The Introduction Package (a fully configured and functioning site out of the box when installing TYPO3), easier installation with the revamped Install Tool, Skinning API, revised Task Center and HTML5 support both in frontend and backend, Caching Framework improvements.

Arxia will begin to use TYPO34.4 with any new upcoming project as we already tested TYPO3 4.4 by the time it was in Beta state and we are confident that it will bring a significant added value to any project. We are also performing on-demand upgrades for our clients who want to implement the new version of TYPO3 for a faster and smoother content management.

If you want to upgrade your installation and need help we are glad to offer it. Just contact us and we will see how can we accomodate your request.

Post written by: Bodor László (Arxia TYPO3 Team)

Main requirements

Our customer approached us with the following list of main requirements:

1. Create an environment where the targeted segment (women) can find relevant content (news, photos and videos) displayed in an attractive format, highlighting the updates.

2. Create an active community, by stimulating the users activity and feedback (adding comments, casting votes, posting in the forum section, participating to surveys, use the internal messaging of the website, creating own albums, etc.). The users are enticed through a system which rewards active users with points.

4. Give and receive opinions to personal issues, by creating a section where the users can ask the feedback of the community about a certain problem (with a functionality similar to Yahoo! Answers).

5. Create a complex astrology section, where one can find the predictions for the current day or year and also can find the compatibility between signs.

Technical requirements

- Use of TYPO3 version 4.2 as a development framework and also as a backend.
- Due to short implementation time and to budget restrictions, public extensions were to be used wherever possible.
- Custom extensions would need to be built for the functionality where we couldn’t find suitable public extensions.
- AJAX technology would be used in order to create a smooth user experience through the interface.

Technical challenges and solutions

1. Implementation using public extensions with respect to the TYPO3 CGL.

Taking into consideration that certain public extensions do not implement TYPO3’s extending methods (for example cwt_community does not use HOOKS or XCLASS) or, in other cases, the separation between the PHP and HTML code is not done at acceptable standards (for example simplesurvey), we have decided to create new extensions, based on the code and logic of some public ones but modified in order to implement the project’s specifications and in the same time apply to the TYPO3 CGL.

2. Using AJAX technology combined with some public extensions that are not implemented using it.

As an example, we’ve used AJAX for adding, replying and browsing the users commentaries of the articles. Originally, this functionality is implemented in TYPO3 using the comments extension, which doesn’t use AJAX.

Implementing custom extensions that use AJAX technology was an interesting experience (voting extension, poll extension, Yahoo! Answer like extension). We tried to use the xajax library using some public extensions – xajax, taxajax, tdo_xajax – but we’ve encountered the same problem: if more than one plugin using AJAX was displayed on a page, only the first plugin worked as expected. Also, when making a request, a lot of unnecessary code was executed in order to create the proper answer. Finally we’ve decided to make the AJAX request using our own JavaScript implementation combined with TypoScript configuration, to avoid the execution of unnecessary code.

3. As the client requirement was to create complex relation between different data types, finding a solution for an easy, fast and user friendly relationship building was a major issue on which our best solution was to use IRRE (Inline Relational Record Editing)

4. The large amount of records added by the editors raised the question of a fast retrieval of a given record. Creating custom backend modules with advanced search filters was a successful solution.

The Beta will soon replace the old version, and when it will happen, the new platform will support over 100.000 visitors / day generating over 600.000 impressions /day, which will probably make it the most visited TYPO3 powered website in Romania!

In the coming weeks we’ll post an interesting case study of this project and if you want to be among the first to receive it, please subscribe to our newsletter here bellow.

We do recommend upgrading your TYPO3 installation to at least TYPO3 4.2 because support for 4.1 will also end soon. But sometimes these upgrades can cause some problems because of incompatible plugins or even settings that work on one version and didn’t work on other versions. Also upgrading plugins too is always a good idea because in fact these are most often targeted by hackers.

If you need assistance upgrading your TYPO3 installation and plugins you can always contact us and we’ll be happy to help.