TYPO3 roadmap for version 13 published

On December 14, 2023, the development roadmap for TYPO3 version 13 was published, which is scheduled for release in October 2024. We look at what was announced and provide further information.

In principle, however, the current announcement of the TYPO3 v13 roadmap should be taken into account that it is based on current knowledge and planning. However, as is usual with other software projects, some of the goals and functions presented, some of which are very ambitious, may still change. It may not even be possible to realize some of them.

The primary goals of the TYPO3 Core development team and the TYPO3 community are to minimize recurring tasks and simplify the daily work of TYPO3 administrators and editors.

This involves two main challenges. The first is to improve the user experience when interacting with the TYPO3 backend. This process should be simple, self-explanatory and guided. The second is to streamline and eliminate repetitive actions.

Based on feedback from the TYPO3 community and many conversations at conferences, barcamps and developer days, the TYPO3 Core Team has learned which actions most backend users have to perform over and over again.

Examples of recurring work for integrators are the creation of websites, the implementation of backend layouts and the configuration of user authorizations. These are necessary steps to prepare a new TYPO3 instance for later editing by editors. TYPO3 integrators have to perform these tasks manually for every new TYPO3 installation. This is followed by tasks such as training editors or providing support for entering website content.

In TYPO3 v13, these processes are to be simplified and manual interaction minimized. Some ideas for this include interactive wizards that guide the user through the necessary steps and actions.

Some of these recurring processes are to be made configurable and duplicable for TYPO3 integrators. Once an integrator or developer has created a workflow for a customer, the configuration should be easily reusable for other customers. An export and import function or an improved duplication process for content are options that are being considered.

The TYPO3 Core Team is constantly striving to keep the TYPO3 backend at the cutting edge of technology and to implement the latest accessibility requirements in the best possible way.

TYPO3 v12 LTS is already equipped with extensive accessibility features.

The granular access permissions and built-in privacy and security standards make TYPO3 a popular choice for governments and the public sector. In 2023, the ITSZ of the Federal Republic of Germany decided to replace the previous semi-proprietary solution "Government Site Builder" with TYPO3 as the "Federal CMS". More than 400 websites of the Federal Republic of Germany will therefore be converted to TYPO3 from 2024.

In order to meet and exceed the strict requirements of the public sector, we will further optimize the TYPO3 community's accessibility and modernize the backend.

While the previously mentioned goals for TYPO3 version 13 were still somewhat vague, some interesting goals are already becoming much more concrete.

Integration of external systems in TYPO3

New APIs (interfaces for external systems) are intended to simplify the integration of external services such as Google Analytics, Matomo, Facebook and others.

Simplification of workspaces

Workspaces have always been a "killer feature" of TYPO3 and are often used by power users and on large TYPO3 instances to create content, establish approval processes and enable workflows across multiple users and user groups.

With the existing TYPO3 workspaces, content can be changed, sent to team or editorial managers for approval and published on a time-controlled basis. TYPO3 editors can also view an old/new view of the content in the website frontend at any time or selectively publish content.

A "simple mode" will then be introduced for these workspaces in order to make workspaces more usable for smaller projects and websites.

Support for modern image rendering

TYPO3 supports a variety of automatic conversion options for images, so automatic resizing or filters for images have always been a function of TYPO3 Core. In the meantime, however, modern image formats such as WebP or AVIF with more efficient data compression have been added, which have a positive effect on the loading time of a website.

If you wanted to use these modern image formats, you either had to rely on one of the free third-party extensions for TYPO3 or on the configuration of the web server.

In TYPO3 v13 LTS, the TYPO3 image rendering component will now be updated to support current and modern image formats natively through the TYPO3 core.

We would alsolike to see automatic image scaling using Get parameters, so that TYPO3, together with the web server, automatically scales images to the sizes required for responsive websites.

Content blocks for easier creation of individual content elements

TYPO3 always provides some typical content elements in the standard installation, such as heading, text, text + image and many more. However, if you want to create your own content elements, there have been a number of different approaches to creating them and making them usable for editors.

In some cases, however, these approaches required third-party extensions, without which these individual content elements could not be used.

With the release of TYPO3 version 12 LTS, there was already a way to create core-related content elements with the Content Blocks, the TYPO3 Structured Content Initiative. For TYPO3 version 13 it is now planned to provide these content blocks with better, native support for user-defined, semantically structured content elements and to make them available as a system extension.

Five TYPO3 v13 releases are planned in the next 10 months:

• 30.01.2024 TYPO3 v13.0: Breaking changes and new system requirements
• 23.04.20 24 TYPO3 v13.1: Reusable components for creating new websites
• 02.07.2024 TYPO3 v13.2: Content blocks and new APIs for integrations
• 17.09.20 24 TYPO3 v13.3: Feature Freeze
• 15.10.20 24 TYPO3 v13.4: LTS release

The TYPO3 community supports each TYPO3 sprint release (v13.0 to v13.3) until the next minor version is released.

The long-term support version TYPO3 v13 LTS (also known as version 13.4) will receive bug fixes until April 30, 2026 and security patches for TYPO3 v13 LTS until October 31, 2027.