#neoscms

I’m currently working on a customer project with a freelancer colleague and when speaking about the TYPO3 and Neos community split, he said: “It starts to become something like a divorce battle.”

The background: On May 18, 2015, it was announced that the TYPO3 Association and the Neos team have begun negotiations about separating the Neos project from the T3A. Those who have been involved with the TYPO3 community for some time are well aware that the original goal of Neos - to become a successor of TYPO3 CMS - is no longer pursued. Instead, Neos and its underlying framework Flow became a new part of the TYPO3 product family.

There has always been a lot of emotionality in discussions regarding Flow and Neos, mainly because the two founding developers of Flow and Neos were full-time employees of the T3A for some years and could - strictly speaking - not deliver what they promised: A successor of TYPO3 CMS. Instead, Neos embraces different concepts, e.g. by focussing on in-place editing of content. The Neos team is also often accused of being a victim to the ”not invented here” syndrome. Apart from some reasonable criticism, as always there is also a “religious” component in the debate and of course some “Schadenfreude” that until today, Neos cannot do “everything better” than CMS.

Even if it’s sad that the split is the necessary consequence of the current situation, I think it’s best for both products. I believe that Neos is not just a misguided nerd project who wants to do everything better. It is fun to integrate, can do a lot out-of-the-box (I don’t miss installing RealURL and Grid Elements) and enables you to create basic functionality for things such as News, Events etc. without needing you to write PHP code. Once you create your first TypoScript (2) objects, assign them to your Fluid template and create the output of your website, you somehow feel home as a CMS integrator. When you create your first node type and thus configure an interface for your users to add and edit records - without coding, you’ll see that what you’re doing is not so different from configuring the TCA of your extension - even if the underlying concepts are.

At the same time, I couldn’t imagine CMS without the inspiration that came from Flow. When I started with TYPO3, there was no Extbase and no Fluid. As a then-non-coder it was not much fun to work with piBase, markers, subparts etc.. People (mis-)used tt_news for nearly everything that should have a list and single view. Yes, maybe DDD would have established itself without Extbase, but Extbase (even though sometimes it’s not only a problem-solver, but also problem-maker) and the intuitive templating engine Fluid lowered the bar for getting into coding and rapid development of CRUD apps.

No one is forced to embrace Neos. But I think a lot of people will agree that both products were and are inspired by and therefore could benefit from each other.

Last Sunday, the EAB of the TYPO3 Association started a member poll regarding the TYPO3 and Neos split. It contains three votings, two regarding the use of remaining budgets for 2015, and one about a license change for Flow. The Neos team would like to change the license of the Flow framework (not Neos CMS, which is and will stay GPL) to the MIT license. The MIT license is more permissive.  Switching to it would allow to use Flow in proprietary software. As with every decision, this opens up new opportunities, but also carries some risk. I don’t know the people of the Neos team very well. But I know them well enough to know that these people are not driven by the idea to make Flow a commercial product.