NEOS has arrived - So what is the future for TYPO3?

The last few years of TYPO3 development have been a bit confused with the debacle of TYPO3 v5 being so delayed due the complexity of writing a completely new platform including a new framework, that TYPO3 V6 was released way before V5 - doh

So what happened to v5 - well as I mentioned in a previous post, this was rebranded TYPO3 NEOS and continued to be developed as an entirely new development stream, running in parallel with TYPO3 CMS.

NEOS v1 was finally released just before Xmas, bringing an entirely new CMS platform to the world in time for 2014.

(http://neos.typo3.org)

So what does this mean for TYPO3 CMS now that NEOS has arrived...is it time to retire TYPO3 as the newer completely re-architected CMS platform has finally arrived?

Whilst NEOS introduces some interesting technical concepts and the front end editing is very slick and elegant, NEOS is no TYPO3 replacement yet because of:

Performance issues - the architecture is computationally intensive and the lack of caching means that NEOS cannot be used for large busy websites

Lack of multi-lingual capabilities will obviously restrict usage for many European companies (the core of TYPO3's market)

The Access control is still only very simple and needs to develop the same level of granular capabilities we are used to

A lack of experienced developers and only a small number of extensions available

So whilst NEOS is now live and ready for consumption, the reality is that it will not for the short term replace TYPO3 CMS.  NEOS is an interesting proposition, which can be used for personal projects. Over time it will evolve and develop and there will be a point where we may find ourselves wondering where to focus our development efforts.

The major downside is that NEOS is fragmenting the TYPO3 community with part of the community focused on cleaning up TYPO3 and modernising the platform whilst the other part are focusing on NEOS and how to mature it to complete with TYPO3. Both teams are borrowing and sharing what they can, cross pollenating both platforms, which is great, but is stretching what the community can do.

For us at Liquid Light, TYPO3 will be our core tool set for the foreseeable future, and for our clients TYPO3 will continue to serve their needs for a fair time yet, as it is from our perspective still the best CMS solution available (even if it is a bit gangly to learn from a development perspective).

by Finn Taylor

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  Finn Taylor