Introduction - please read!
I wrote this back in October of 2012 so please forgive those references to facts that are no longer relevant. I'd like to add that this isn't a personal attack although I realise (as I also state in the letter) that it is quite likely some may be offended. Offence is not my purpose here - I only have the community's best interests in mind although this letter is written as a personal opinion based on considerable experience.
Please accept it in the spirit it was written: for the common good.
...but don't forget to save the ashes.
This will be the brutally honest truth about what I think about the whole Phoenix/Flow ordeal. I will not waste your time with diplomatic filler; what you read here will probably either make you say “damn right!” or cause you to reject my opinions outright – some may even be offended. The brand change is what finally caused the dam to break. It has made it embarrassingly obvious to me that we are wrong, o so wrong about what we are doing right now. However, the rebranding is only a symptom of the much more serious problems: division, confusion and subsequent apprehension.
TYPO3 has been experiencing very little market growth as a CMS lately. Not in features, but in attraction. Meaning that fewer new users are trying TYPO3 CMS (we will get to that dear branding thing later, I promise, and by the way that was the last time in this article that I use the new brand names).
Why is this stagnation happening?
I will argue that this is not because of lacking marketing, not because of a bad reputation or any sort of technical problem. It is emotional and stems from fear caused by doubt. The reason for the doubt and thus the core if the problem is that we (yes we, since I was one of those people) have been touting Phoenix as something that would soon be released and would be amazing. And we've been doing this for years now. Because of this people now doubt that now or anytime soon will be the sensible time to adopt TYPO3 as a CMS.
We have been chumming the waters for far too long and we really should expect the sharks to start eating us soon. The outsider has to think that there must be a reason why we are spending mountains of resources on making a completely new CMS based on what boils down to mere faith and confidence. We as a community don't directly explain what the reason for this somewhat strange faith is precisely – but logical induction will tell the outsider that it is quite simply because TYPO3 is not a modern CMS, regardless of how often we say it. What we say is just not true. Ouch. That pill is not going to be easily swallowed by anyone contemplating which CMS to use. And this is how the sharks will eat us. They can smell the blood – and they are not stupid. No amount of clever marketing and brand re-innovation can keep them from this realization as long as we keep on chumming the waters with talk of Phoenix. Marketing- and brand-wise Phoenix already amounts to a small disaster for TYPO3. And it will cost us more than it already has.
Especially an outsider who wants to make a modern, large scale web site would be alarmed. This is the core of the fear and doubt that I argue is keeping away potential users in the segments that we as a community want to attract; modern projects on a large scale. So the outsider, the spectator, waits because he is asked to have faith. Just like we are all waiting and have waited for years because we were asked to have faith; be confident. We'll keep waiting this way, almost standing still (completely standing still attraction-wise) until something happens. Until either somebody questions our faith or we all become blinded by it.
Part of this problem is being attempted solved by releasing TYPO3 6.0 – we are now employing namespaces, using Extbase/Fluid for many core extensions and getting rid of a lot of deprecated code that has made TYPO3 seem less modern. But this renewal – although welcome and refreshing – is sending a signal that we are trying to make TYPO3 more like the Phoenix that will (maybe) one day rise to take its place. In a friendly way, taking years and years. When we explain why we upgraded TYPO3 6.0 in those specific ways, the explanation will inevitably begin to look just like the justification for making Phoenix and consequently for making FLOW3. To me, this evokes thoughts of having two teams internally compete and steal ideas from each other in the blind hope that it will make for a better product in the end. When the dust has settled, the customers have all left because this friendly competition looks ridiculous and almost schizophrenic from the outside.
So what is really happening by all this?
TYPO3 is becoming more like Phoenix. We are taking lessons learned from Phoenix and applying them to TYPO3. And do not get me wrong; this is a very good thing! It is code evolution and inspiration – we learn and we adapt. However, the premise itself for Phoenix has become flawed. We are developing “our future CMS”, all while turning TYPO3 into “our future CMS”. Spectators are quite sensitive to this inconsistency and there is simply no way for us to explain (read: excuse) it any longer. This has been made finally impossible by the breaking of the Berlin Manifesto: that Phoenix will not be upgrade-compatible to TYPO3.
We are not failing in creating a new CMS. We are failing in creating one new CMS and quite possibly that has far worse end result. The dreaded fork that Kasper warned us about a long time ago.
What we are doing is not working the way the community originally intended. To make things worse it is also taking far too long – and we have to come to the realization that stopping is just about the only sane approach. We have to stop attempting to sprout new branches. There is not enough nourishment left in the trunk to support this effort. The community tree is in pain, slowly dividing in two, simultaneous with the diffusion of the efforts. This is not the path to survival; it is the the path to starvation. Of audience, of contributions and worst of all of credibility. Ignoring the loss of any of these is insane. And yes we are unfortunately slowly going insane, bit by bit.
WYSINWYG
We, the community, wanted a next major version of our beloved CMS. What we did not want was a framework on which to build our next major version of our beloved CMS. But that is what we received. The battle then started all over again; this time we fight to do what we from the start set out to do – but because of decisions made along the way we can no longer promise our audience a next major version. We can only offer them a different CMS. In a way, we tried to compete with Drupal and Joomla by creating one more CMS, but forgot along the way that we ourselves would also be competing against our own CMS in the eyes of the target audience.
And it gets worse still: we have gone blind to the most important thing. The community. It is not merely the quality of the core of TYPO3 that makes TYPO3 great. It is all the things that have been built to work with TYPO3 that make TYPO3 great. It is impossible to gain the popularity of TYPO3 without this, and it is being thrown to the side with such disregard that, in an incredible feat of pure arrogance, someone had the revolting idea that FLOW3 packages maybe some day could run on TYPO3. Academic, yes, but also quite disconnected from the practical reality (read: insane).
What are we really trying to say by doing this ass backwards, how should people perceive such a thing as profound and consistent...? Your guess is as good as mine. Had things been reversed – had we picked parts from FLOW3 and Phoenix that we want in TYPO3 and just left it at that – then things would have been different. But by letting FLOW3 and Phoenix dictate so much of the direction instead of restricting their movement while keeping one eye on the Berlin Manifesto at all times, we have now successfully communicated that FLOW3 and Phoenix are much more important than TYPO3. Even if they are far from ready to be used. This is how the tail wags the dog and has been doing so for years and years.
I have said many times before that the “FLOW3 Schism” is the greatest pain in the community. I see this schism expressed almost every day now – and not just by me. I want TYPO3 to survive and would never willfully do anything to harm it or the community. But I see danger on the horizon and must warn; I see infection in the new branches – and my suggestion is to cut them off and do it now.
Diplomacy dischmomacy. I promised you brutal honesty and I will deliver.
I believe this, quite simply, is what we need to do as a community in order to first survive, then grow, reunite and move on:
-- Let the Phoenix burn but use the ashes.
This is the absolute first step. We should stop all development on Phoenix. We should take what we have learned which is good and practical, and apply it to TYPO3. This is how we will strengthen the strongest part of our body by cutting off the weak parts. What I suggest is the equivalent of an amputation.
As a result TYPO3 will immediately be stronger. The wounds of division will heal in time. The brand will be stronger as well: one CMS which we believe in so much that we were willing to abandon a mountain of misplaced efforts in replacing it, because we have people who are so dedicated to preserving TYPO3 that what seemed like an insurmountable obstacle – actually was not.
If TypoScript can be rewritten to be used in FLOW3 then the sky really is the limit. We need the talent that can do this sort of thing to do it again, but this time do it to save instead of to kill; to improve instead of just replace. Just imagine what TYPO3 would have looked like if the tens of thousands of hours spent on FLOW3 instead were spent on TYPO3. If those millions of Euros had gone into strengthening the TYPO3 core. Would we perhaps have had TYPO3 6.0 back in 2009 if we had done that?
We must correct the bad decision that caused our current situation instead of treating the symptoms. We must focus on remaining one CMS with a united development effort behind it.
-- Give FLOW3 to the OpenSource community
Relinquish control and we will have freed many now highly competent resources to take what has been learned from FLOW3 and use all of those vital lessons to make TYPO3 even stronger. We have got to admit to ourselves now that the justification was just not there for creating an entirely new framework almost in competition with the established players Doctrine and Symfony, instead of pooling efforts and perhaps even funds with those developers to be able to move TYPO3 onto one or both some day in the future.
FLOW3 is a good product with its own merit. Naturally so – it was after all made by very skilled people who were paid handsomely for a long, long time to do just that. But it is time to stop this academic effort and turn our attention to practical needs. The exam centerpiece is done; the FLOW3 creators pass. If FLOW3 can now survive and be used by other Open Source communities then by all means, that is what it should go ahead and do.
This will be TYPO3's gift to the world. An amazing PHP Framework that has inspired TYPO3 hugely; made by the people who (now) work on making TYPO3 just as amazing.
A very, very generous gift. That we depart with now so that it may not confuse our focus in the future.
-- The turnaround
Drop the rebranding. It is unnecessary – if we let the mythical Phoenix burn and give FLOW3 to the world, we are right back to what TYPO3 has been about since the start and what we are best at being about. The world's best enterprise CMS. Only better and stronger than ever before, because our efforts and resources – economical as well as intellectual – are no longer divided.
TYPO3 should be a CMS and it should be one CMS. Instead of a confused shop which sells frameworks, templating engines, code generation utilities – and, oh yes, two different CMSes; neither of them the best that we would be able to offer, had it not been for the splitting of efforts and resources.
Am I wrong?
Do we believe enough in TYPO3 to consume Phoenix and become much stronger – and are we confident enough as parents of FLOW3 that we trust it to live its own life now?