The TYPO3 association and the Neos team announced a parting of ways - Neos and the underlying Flow PHP Framework will be maintained as separate projects. This came as a surprise to many developers and agencies who are using the ambitious CMS in their projects. The Neos team has taken up the challenge and released an awesome Neos 2.0 and Flow 3.0. There is great momentum in the project and we at Sandstorm are looking forward to develop awesome content-based web application with Neos.
We are convinced that the Neos and Flow projects have a great future ahead of them. Here are our ten reasons why. (updated on August 21st, 2015)
Also check out our other recent blog articles about Neos:
1 Clear Communication
Both Neos and the TYPO3 CMS suffered from the issue of unclear brand communication. Newcomers had a hard time understanding why one association would build two CMS, even if the systems had a different focus. This confused people, led to lower trust and inhibited adoption, since it was unclear whether one of the systems would be abandoned at some point. These times are over now: Neos as well as TYPO3 CMS can now speak for themselves and decide in which direction to go, without having to justify or explain their existence. This will greatly reduce barriers to adoption and allow the projects to dedicate these resources to more important things.
2 Energized Community
It might be surprising at first, but the split has released a tremendous amount of energy in the community. With the new communication infrastructure in place very shortly after the announcement of the split, the active Neos CMS community has had the possibility to regather and tackle the issues at hand. People are discussing how to build the community and foster adoption of the system. Meetup groups are forming, and even international adoption is growing: user groups are being founded in countries like France, Denmark, Russia and even Cambodia. This creates an incredible momentum for Neos and Flow.
3 We Stay Friends
The TYPO3 Association and the Neos CMS project will still have shared endeavours, such as the deployment system TYPO3 Surf. Both projects and their communities have benefited massively from each other in the past, and no bridges have been burned during the split. Personal friendships still connect us and will continue to do so. In the long run, the projects will certainly be able to establish a spirit of collaboration that will help both Neos and TYPO3 CMS.
4 Stable Core Team
With regards to the development of Neos CMS, not much has changed. The core team had a strategy sprint meeting shortly after the split was announced, during which they confirmed their support of and commitment to Neos. The team thus remains stable, and new contributors are being attracted. Consequently, we don’t see any danger of development starting to lag behind - in fact, quite the contrary!
5 Backed By Aspiring Agencies
There are several strong agencies that drive the development of Neos and the Flow Framework. Most notably, Neos core developers Karsten Dambekalns, Robert Lemke and Christian Müller founded Flownative, an agency dedicated to supporting other professionals implementing Flow and Neos. Several other core developers work in or lead their own agencies that are dedicated to the further development of Flow and Neos, such as TechDivision, networkteam, netlogix and of course us here at sandstorm|media. There are also internationally-operating agencies like MOC from Kopenhagen or India-based Lelesys. Many of these agencies do both Neos CMS and TYPO3 CMS, which will make sure that the bonds between those projects will not wither.
6 Control Over License And Infrastructure
The TYPO3 association of course has an existing project infrastructure in place. While most of it works very well, it is hard to get used to for newcomers. Especially the requirement to fill out and sign the infamous CLA (Contributor's License Agreement) put many aspiring contributors off. The Neos team wants to enable contributions without a CLA and move Flow from LGPL to an even less restrictive license. Together with having its code based at GitHub, this means anyone can contribute by means of pull requests. This will further spur support by contributors. Moreover, the Neos team has already deployed its new infrastructure. Documentation will be hosted and rendered at ReadTheDocs. The new website www.neos.io hosts a Discourse instance as main hub of asynchronous communication, and the Slack channels under slack.neos.io are already very active and a source of great ideas to improve Neos CMS.
7 Increased Transparency
At times, it was challenging to understand what was going on in the TYPO3 Association. Being a large organization with numerous different projects, it was, especially for newcomers, difficult to find the right contact person for questions or suggestions. The Neos team has understood that this is a huge barrier of adoption for the developer community, and is discussing and implementing ideas to change that. Have a look at the split FAQ for starters.
8 Simplified Adoption
Documentation has in the past been one of the major weaknesses of Neos CMS and the Flow PHP Framework. Some parts of the core documentation are still missing, however that is bound to change soon. A project team has formed that plans to consolidate the different approaches of improving the documentation and work on them step-by-step, in order to make it easy for developers to get started with Flow or Neos. Moreover, there is "Project Red Carpet", an initiative that is collecting ideas on how to simplify the adoption of the systems. We hope that these ideas will make it dramatically easier to provide help and support for newcomers.
9 Modern Foundation, Ambitious Ideas
Yes, it has taken a while to get Neos 1.0 out. Since then, however, features have been added at a great rate and the Flow Framework is a solid and modern technical foundation. Neos 2.0 and Flow 3.0 have been released and bring many features awaited by the community. Even though the competition is strong, Neos has a dedicated set of features that make it stand out. Its focus on being the next-gen CMS for multi-channel publishing and the visionary COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) principle make it a strong player in the enterprise CMS market. We believe that Neos has the foundation, ambition, vision and the team to make these ideas reality.
10 The Users Love It
In the end, it all comes down to what our users and customers think. It is them for whom we build software, and it is them who, in the end, decide which systems thrive and which do not. Neos CMS still has a way to go when it comes to adoption, but those who do use it, are surprised by how easy, slick and modern the system feels. We want to promote this experience and are certain that the system speaks for itself once your end users get their hands on it.
Want To Contribute?
We believe in Neos CMS and the Flow project, and we'd love to see interested developers, designers and just about anyone who wants to support the Neos project do so. You can reach out to the Neos community in a variety of ways:
- Stay up to date at www.neos.io
- Join the discussion at slack.neos.io
- Read tweets about #neosCMS
- Follow the Neos project on Twitter
We'd love to get in touch with you! Contact us on Twitter or send us an email.