My Experience at the TYPO3 Conference in Dallas (T3CON09)

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By: Nicole Johnson

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First off let me set the tone for my experiences by saying that the TYPO3 world is still relatively new to me. Since the opening of Acqal in October of 2008 I’ve only just begun to delve into TYPO3. I’ve been working with Acqal’s CEO, Michael Cannon, for about four years, but my experience with him was to design templates, HTML and CSS, outside of TYPO3. Michael would take my work and handle the template installation. I would handle tweaking the styles afterwards. It’s only now that I’ve begun to work a bit with TemplaVoila and templating inside TYPO3.

That being said, there’s been a bit of a disconnect between myself and the TYPO3 community. T3CON09 in Dallas bridged a huge gap for me. It was fantastic to finally put some faces and personalities to the names I hear from Michael and Acqal’s COO, Virgil Huston, on a regular basis.

A whole-hearted thank you needs to go out to Ron Hall and the Dallas community for organizing this event as well as the Irving Bible Church for hosting us. The Irving Bible Church was an amazing establishment, setup with Wifi, a café, impressive children’s area and great conference rooms. This is unlike any church I’ve ever visited.

I’m not going to go through all of the presentations I sat in, as some were a bit over my head being a TYPO3 newbie. Make sure to check out the various slide show presentations from the conference, T3CON09 Slideshows.

I found Ron Hall’s presentation on his soon to be released TYPO3 templating and methodologies. I found that Ron’s approach to work flow will assist in setting expectations on timeline and deliverables. I also thought that his ideas on template structure, header, footer, content (dynamic and static), was a great way to simplify when discussing layout with clients. I’m looking forward to the release in May.

What I felt was exceptionally helpful were the discussions had outside of the tutorials. Europe has done a great job in binding together and educating businesses and developers on TYPO3. The United States is a bit behind. There were many conversations on how we need to build tighter knit TYPO3 communities for developers, designers and companies in order to gain the local support needed. In the United States we tend to view other developers, designers and companies who offer the same competencies as competition. While this is true, there is another side to it. The more TYPO3 support we can build and offer in the United States, the more educated companies become on the product and the more potential work. I found that in the many individuals and companies that were involved in these conversations over the conference, we all had our strengths and weaknesses. Building partnerships, building communities to support each other, opening the lines of communication and providing better – and more importantly easier and quicker local support – will allow us to raise TYPO3 awareness in the U.S.

As these were all discussions and there were a lot of great idea, action needs to be made. My plan is to be directly involved in opening the lines of communication within the TYPO3 community. We can certainly use the European and Dallas communities as good examples.