Recap of TYPO3camp Venlo 2017

March 10th marked the start of the Barcamp season for TYPO3 in 2017.
For the 5th time, the Barcamp in Venlo is a fixed date on our calendar - especially because it’s a nice mix of meeting old friends as well as making new ones.

This year, the camp moved to a different location since Fontys University was not available for the camp this year. So the team decided to move to Domani in Venlo’s historic center and boy-oh-boy, the location is awesome.
The former church is now used as an event location and the staff running it are incredibly friendly, professional and helpful.
My favourite session room was the former wedding chapel, a room which held up to 40 people in a stunning environment.

The yard in front of the venue offered a relaxed place to sit and discuss things. This was where we spent most of the social event on Friday night, having a good chat with everybody.

All sessions held a nice balance between technical talks and business talks.
There are three sessions that we consider worth mentioning, though.

We had guests from the Wordpress community. For those who don’t know, Yoast SEO is a plugin that helps editors optimize their websites. Currently Yoast has about 60 employees and  their SEO plugin runs on more than 6 million websites.
This alone is something truly remarkable.
Together with dutch TYPO3 agency MaxServ they are now making these functions available for TYPO3 as well. This shows that we have gotten TYPO3 back on track with the industry - according to the plans the core team laid out in late 2014.

Talking to Joost de Valk gave us a fresh perspective on how Open Source should professionalize in the near future and we were actually both happy with the design of our new Partner Program.

In general we must say that we look forward to working closer together with Yoast in the future.

Björn Jacob of the german TYPO3 agency TRITUM took a ~500km trip to Venlo from Jena to demo the all-new Form Extension that made it to the TYPO3 core.

After a development period of about 7 months this extension gives an outlook of what to expect from TYPO3 in the future.
Creating forms is really easy with its built-in editor. But the real magic starts when you need something more complex than a simply email form.

The framework supplied by the extension can be extended in every way, from custom form finishers that process the form data via adding new properties for certain fields so editors can design forms in a confined space to complex multi-step forms.

On behalf of the TYPO3 core team we would like to say “Thank You” for this magnificent piece of software.

We held up the tradition of a session for the Dutch community. It was just the second time that we actually held a dedicated session about it, but this already qualifies as a tradition.

The session itself was about getting the Dutch community to work together more closely and empowering people to work more autonomously within their region.

The discussion was very productive and we rest assured our fellow Dutch community members will be accomplishing some great things in the near future.

We have a little surprise up our sleeves for Meet TYPO3 in Rotterdam on April 20th, 2017, so stay tuned.

As usual, the vibe in Venlo was great. I love the Dutch community for their passion, pragmatism and their ability to positively surprise us every year with an even better Camp.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank all the sponsors:

• MaxServ
• Yoast
• Beech.it
• Coders.Care
• Team WFP
• Emaux
• Patrick “T3Batman” Broens
• Redkiwi
• Roquin
• WIND Internet
• alterNET

A very special Thank You goes out to the organizers for organizing such an outstanding event:

• Beech.it
• Patrick “T3Batman” Broens
• Emaux
• ID Internet Services
• Age of Peers
   

We are looking forward to the next years to come!