Takeaways from the TYPO3 Camp Mallorca 2015

Takeaways from the TYPO3 Camp Mallorca 2015

· by · in

Last weekend I took the opportunity to visit the TYPO3 Camp Mallorca 2015. Since I moved to Palma just two months ago, I didn’t hestitate to register for the event. It was packed with more than 100 TYPO3 enthusiasts. Beside of the great sessions we also had nice dinners with traditional mallorquin food, and a lot of drinks, espacially vino blanco y tinto.

For the sessions which I attended I want to give a quick overview of the learnings I could take away.

Two talks were given by Roland from ENTWICKLUNGSHILFE with great insights for PHP development, basically done with PHPStorm.

1. Clean Code PHPStorm Best Practice

In his talk Roland emphasised the importance of clean code, including coding standards like PSR-2. This standard has just recently been adopted by the Flow and Neos team, for instance.

Why is it worth considering to keep your code lean and clean?

  • The day will come
  • Hard to debug
  • Bad performance
  • Exploding costs
  • Company harmony will be destroyed
  • The relationship to the client will be different in the future
  • AND SO ON!!!

Takeaway:

Remove Technical Depth!

http://presentations.entwicklungshilfe.nrw/cleancode.html

2. PHPUnit Refactoring

The second talk was about refactoring with PHPUnit and PHPStorm. Roland showed an example within a Magento installation which he fired up with a quick vagrant up.

The vagrant box is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/Entwicklungshilfe-NRW/magentoModulRefactoringBox

We were working on some rubbish code where the audience had been included. It was a fun session.

Takeaway:

You never code alone

3. What is LEAN? Developing Agile Products

Gina gave a talk on basic lean principles when developing products. In stark contrast to the traditional waterfall model, lean and agile development is a complete different approach. You’ll ask your customer what he wants, and he might be telling you he needs a big SUV. But at the core of his problem is only ‘how to get from A to B.’ Maybe a skateboard would already be enough. No? Then maybe a small car? ‘OK, that will do it, I’ll take it.’ Iterate as long as you meet the client’s exact need.

Takeaway:

Don’t ask: What do you want to have?
Ask instead: What do you want to do?

4. Introducing Featured Search

Search functionality on websites or within apps is not often a pleasant experience. Sven Huppach presented a few bad examples and he gave some recommendations on how to improve your onsite search.

On a typical wish list for a good search functionality we would usually find this:

  • Fast search results
  • Easy to manage by editors
  • Allow typos (fuzzy search)
  • Allow aliases

For the frontend part he is using the Javascript library typeahead.js which I can also strongly recommend.

1st Takeaway:

Focus on max. 80% and not 100% in terms of optimization

2nd Takeaway (from Jochen Weiland):

Use the ‘q’ GET parameter for search as it will be recognised by analytics software

5. Lean UX, efficient website building, and Hypervirtualisation

In small discussion rounds we talked about a wide range of topics. From the Lean UX session I learned that still plain paper and pencil work best for quickly drafting initial ideas. To put this ideas into life with prototyping tools I am really looking forward to using the Neos based project Typostrap.

In another round we discussed the advantages and pitfalls with TYPO3 and Docker in general. One attendee described how he uses Docker for his agency’s development process and CI pipeline. Though they don’t use Docker for production yet.

For TYPO3 CMS development I am glad to see that more and more people are using Fluid based approaches for website templating. One talk was about Fluidcontent and -pages with no Typoscript involved. You can build sophisticated and greatly flexible websites with the Fluid Powered TYPO3 suite. For my last freelance project we were using it extensively for an international car rental company that required a lot of custom content elements. So if you don’t use it already, have a closer look!

Should you have missed this year’s episode of the TYPO3 Camp Mallorca it’s definitely worth to check it out next year. Preferably you add a few more days where you can explore the beautiful island, and maybe we will meet next year for some delicious Tapas!

– Thomas