Meanwhile, the immediate attention of the TYPO3 Association turns to making fundamental (and many) detail improvements to the typo3.org website, ultimately turning it into the collaboration platform we all hope for.

Event Committee

T3CON '06: Over 250 participants from all of Europe, Canada, the United States, Peru, Japan, and the Philippines attended the conference in Karlsruhe to listen to more than 20 presentations and to meet with other professional TYPO3 users. The next TYPO3 conference will aim at further improving the variety of speeches by also inviting experts on related topics from outside of the TYPO3 community. One example would be David Nüscheler, the JSR170 specification leader, speaking about the future of content repositories. Even so, TYPO3-specific speeches will dominate the conference and additional organisational enhancements are planned to help improve the experience for attendees and speakers alike. The third international TYPO3 conference will take place in Karlsruhe, Germany from September 20th to 22nd, 2007.

T3BOARD07: With over 130 people, both newbies and snowsports fanatics, the original TYPO3 community event visits Les Deux-Alpes in the French Alps from January 27th, 2006 to February 3rd, 2007. A few spots are still left, so please register to come and experience the spirit of the TYPO3 community (while getting stoked) [1].

Questions regarding these events should be posted to the event committee's mailing list t3a-events@lists.association.typo3.org" target="_blank">[2]. Joining the committee is just as easy! Simply hook up with the list and offer your help wherever you see fit.

Research and Development Committee

No direct news from the committee, except for the successful T3DD event in August and a meeting held in Berlin in June. Both of them have helped to shape ideas and strategies for version 4.x and 5.0 of TYPO3, while, in the meantime, the original plans and approaches had undergone a quick organic development. More on this topic can be found in the 5.0 development news [3]. A release date and the functionality that is planned for 4.1 will be announced in the regular news on typo3.org shortly. For now, it is scheduled for the end of the year, or no later than January 2007.

Up next is 4.0.3, another maintenance release which is due in November. The most notable improvements and additions in TYPO3 4.1 will be a remodeled backend navigation system, as already presented in a very early version at T3CON '06 in Kasper's keynote speech. This will make the main module navigation completely configurable and will introduce a customizable backend start page, the so-called "Dashboard". Version 4.1 will also complete the usage of UTF-8 encoding for document titles and as a standard in new installations for the front- and backend.

Numerous attendees made this year's T3CON a repeated success.

Bernhard Kraft is applying the final touches to a faster, less memory-consuming version of the extension manager. MM relations can be bidirectional and FE users can be configured to stay logged in permanently (permalogin). Another interesting addition is the work of Oliver Hader: "Inline Relational Record Editing", aptly named IRRE (German for "mad") [4].

Most of these improvements are in a mature state and the core team is concentrating on bug fixing and polishing the hood for prime time before the snowboard tour.

Certification Committee

The Certification Committee [5] has regrouped and started activities aiming at implementing a certification opportunity for individuals and organisations. At the time of writing, a survey on your interest in TYPO3 certification is underway. Please support the committee by participating [6].

Enjoy the snow, wherever you are and keep TYPO3 going strong.