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The TYPO3 Story

Information about how the TYPO3 project started and its major milestones

TYPO3 was initially created by Kasper Skårhøj, a Danish developer, in 1997. The term “Content Management” was still widely unknown, but as websites became more and more complex, the idea to have a system that separated design and content was a smart solution to an emerging problem.

Photograph of Kasper Skårhøj

Timeline of Major Events

Somewhere in Denmark: Kasper Skårhøj, identifies the need for a new kind of CMS. Customers are starting to ask for a tool to maintain their website that separates content from their design templates.

  • Kasper develops three prototypes and starts to iterate on each of them; a final concept emerges
  • TYPO3 is taken under commercial development by the web agency superfish.com and strategic goals are set
  • August: Kasper visits the Seybold exhibition in San Francisco and has a meeting with David Siegel, a famous computer scientist
  • October: TYPO3 is presented as an enterprise grade web content management system in a workshop held by David Siegel at the IFRA exhibition in Lyon, France
  • November: superfish.com teams up with the Danish branch of Saatchi & Saatchi, to bring them into the internet business in a single leap

  • Technical foundation of TYPO3 is finalised
  • A new core is developed from scratch that proves a flexible and powerful base for the system up to today
  • August: Kasper leaves superfish.com with the TYPO3 development rights
  • This decision was based on the difficulties he experienced when combining his desire for quality with commercial software development timeframes. The latter would require rushed releases, resulting in an incoherent patchwork of code inside TYPO3. Additionally, Kasper discovered that he was more passionate about sharing and setting his own agenda than pursuing the traditional commercial route; so Kasper decided to go solo.

  • August: The first public beta of TYPO3 is launched
    Having initially thought the project would require another six months, Kasper launched the first public beta in August 2000 - twelve months after leaving his old agency and only a week before getting married. Up until this point TYPO3 was developed in almost complete secrecy, however it had now entered its second phase: merciless crash-testing and feedback from the open source world.
  • December: Having passed initial scrutiny, TYPO3 starts to develop its own community. New ideas and new feature requests further enhance its development.

  • April: Kasper hosts the first week-long TYPO3 workshop for the Swiss new-media academy "Hyperwerk"
  • Summer: Major clean-up and streamlining of the code
    Result: strengthening the TYPO3 code base, defining concepts for extendibility
  • September: The German IT professional magazine iX on TYPO3, crediting it generally favourably and proving TYPO3 is now a major PHP-based CMS
  • TYPO3 became open source

  • Winter: First TYPO3 community meeting
    Twenty five TYPO3 aficionados meet for a week of snowboarding and TYPO3 seminars in Austria. The snowboard tour was born.
  • TYPO3 Milestone, May 24th: Release of TYPO3 version 3.0, leaving the beta-stage
  • May 29th: The German PHP Magazine features 40 PHP based CMSs
    TYPO3 is reviewed in detail alongside four commercial systems and holds its own
  • The Extension Manager: The powerhouse of TYPO3 is conceived, tested, improved and refined
  • Relaunch of typo3.com and typo3.org, featuring a new corporate identity

  • Release of TYPO3 3.5 containing well-known features such as segmentation of TYPO3 in Core, System Extensions and support for 3rd Party Extensions via the introduction of the Extension Manager 

  • Release of TYPO3 3.6 in May featuring well-known features such as Standard Content Elements that conform to XHTML, setting the foundation to barrier-free websites
  • Release of TYPO3 3.7 in September containing features such as simplified content-localisation, adding support for a Command Line Interface and "language" as HMENU type
  • The TYPO3 Association was founded

  • Release of TYPO3 3.8. in May featuring now well-known features such as GraphicsMagick compatibility, multi-language ability for the backend, authentication services added to the core
  • First mentioning of T3N Magazine in August
  • First TYPO3 Conference in Karlsruhe, called TYCON3 back then typo3.org upgraded to TYPO3 3.8

  • With the release of version TYPO3 4.0 in April, the system received an improved user interface and its featureset now allowed it be considered a true enterprise content management system, used in complex projects in a wide variety of corporate and business settings
  • Relaunch of typo3.org and typo3.com representing results of T3BRAND workshop in February

  • Release of TYPO3 4.1 in March featuring now well-known features such as improved page tree with Ajax, introduction of Inline Relational Record Editing (IRRE), improved UTF-8 support and enabling of InnoDB features

  • Introduction of the TYPO3 Certified Integrator progam
  • The Berlin Manifesto
  • Release of TYPO3 4.2 in April featuring now well-known features such as many GUI improvements in the backend, including AJAX features, extended features of the text editor, improvement of frontend login and extension update process

  • Release of TYPO3 4.3 in November featuring now well-known features such as modified frontend editing, flash uploader and recycle bin for the backend, new system reports & system scheduler, introducing the new caching framework, security improvements with Salt (cryptography) & RSA, integration of Extbase & Fluid features

  • Release of TYPO3 4.4 in June featuring now well-known features such as full backend redesign incl. performance improvements, simplified installation, first Introduction Package - a complete website template, CSS and javascript compression, HTML5 support in frontend

  • TYPO3 version 4.5 "LTS" was published for the first time. "LTS" stands for "Long Term Support" and secured the maintenance and support in the form of updates and security patches for three years.
  • Release of TYPO3 4.6 in October featuring now well-known features such as internationalization with XLIFF, new website form content element, security & performance improvements
  • Release of TYPO3 Flow 1.0 (formerly FLOW3) in November

  • Release of TYPO3 4.7 in April 2012 featuring now well-known features such as complete Accessibility for new installations acc. to WCAG, introducing new HTML5 elements like <audio> & <video>, improvements for TCEforms, introducing the Government Package
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 6.0 in November featuring now well-known features such as PHP namespace support, File Abstraction Layer - the foundation for TYPO3 6.2 LTS, drag & drop in the Page Module, support for IPv6, standardized bootstrap for mount points
  • Release of TYPO3 Flow 1.1 (formerly FLOW3) in August

  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 6.1 in April was released featuring now well-known features such as improvements for the File Abstraction Layer, UI improvements for the Extension Manager, use for PHP mysqli instead of "mysql" module
  • Release of TYPO3 Flow 2.0 in June
  • Release of TYPO3 Neos 1.0 in December

  • In march TYPO3 CMS 6.2, the next LTS version after TYPO3 CMS 4.5 was released and provides maintenance updates for 3 years until October 2017.
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 7 in December - the first sprint release towards final 7 LTS.

  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 7.1 in February - Home Improvement.
  • In May the TYPO3 Association and the Neos team have begun negotiations about separating the Neos project from the TYPO3 Association. Link: [News bulletin]. All information about Neos can be found under www.neos.io.
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 7.3 in June - More Stability, More Control.
  • In June the first TYPO3 Alumni #CertiFUNcation Day was held.
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 7.4 in August - Nothing is impossible.
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 7.5 in September
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 7 LTS in November

  • TYPO3 Fluid is released as a standalone library on Github
  • TYPO3 GmbH is founded by the TYPO3 Association

  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 8 LTS in April
  • Introduction of the academic and community membership types
  • Relaunch of the typo3.org website with TYPO3 Version 8

  • The General Assembly decides to disband the Expert Advisory Board, simplifying the TYPO3 Association's structure.
  • Release of TYPO3 CMS 9 LTS in October.
  • An evaluation by HTTP Archive based on Chrome UX Report data shows TYPO3 is the world's fastest CMS.

So where did the name TYPO3 come from?

TYPO3 creator Kasper Skårhøj remembers it like this:

Back in the late 1990s, while still working on the initial version of his new CMS, he was looking for a name for the new software. At the time, the name “freestyle” appealed to him, but it posed some problems through its over-association with certain activities, products and trademarks. So the issue of naming stayed on the back burner for want of a better idea.

Then, one Friday evening while he was alone in the office after hours coding, Kasper inadvertently typed an error into the command line of his Linux server and accidentally deleted a whole week work. He recalls that feeling you get of a cold rush through the body, when you realize something dreadful has happened. Slowly he got up, walked to the other end of the room and sat down in the couch looking back across the office at the laptop on his desk.

He stayed like this for a while, just staring out into the room. Then, after the initial shock had subsided, he walked back, sat down, and began to recreate the lost code. This went surprisingly quickly; as such things do when you have them fully worked out in your head. And it was during this new rush of adrenaline and the satisfaction that all was not actually lost, that he began to put the incident into perspective. The recreated programming was going smoothly and cleanly, which made him wonder how ironic it would be if a typo ended up actually improving the product! It was this thought that first brought up the expression “typo” as a possible name. It seemed to fit especially well because

  • “typo”, as in typography, had something to do with layout and content and
  • “typo”, as in a typing mistake, now had a quirky share in the product’s history.

The newborn child now had a name.

Originally there were Typo versions 1, 2 and 2.5. But with the success of version 3, which had branded itself more or less by default, a “3” was eventually appended to the product title itself. Since the launch of “TYPO3 version 4”, TYPO3 has remained as the product name for all future versions. So, TYPO3 it is called … and TYPO3 it will continue to be.