To make a little noise about the jubilee, I reached out to Georg, who lives in Linz, Austria, to learn more about his decade-long life and journey with the extension News (aka. News system).

2011: A Time of Change

The News extension was launched during a time when a lot of changes were happening to TYPO3. “Like moving away from t3lib_div to namespaces, using Git instead of SVN, and Gerrit instead of mailing lists,” says Georg. 

It was a lot to take in at once: “I remember a crazy time in Berlin when we in the Core Team got an introduction to Git, Gerrit, public and private keys, and all with combinations of Windows, Mac, and Unix. Most of us had no clue—at least myself.”

Another important technology pair was entering the stage too: The Extbase framework and Fluid templating engine. Georg loved it. “It was actually the first real API giving you a kind of Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. I have always liked the fast results you can achieve by using Extbase, Fluid, and the Extension Builder.”

I can hardly imagine a site that wouldn’t need the News extension. Furthermore, the News extension provides many helpful examples, even for the Core Documentation. It was the first extension to make me see a real value behind Fluid. The TYPO3 world would be a poorer place without Georg Ringer’s extensions.

—Lina Wolf, Developer, Documentation Team member

The Need for News (Without Markers)

The News extension wasn’t the first news extension for TYPO3. Back then, the most popular news extension was tt_news, but it was based on the old standard: clunky templates with replacement markers and lots of TypoScript.

“tt_news was used in every project and we had grown tired of markers like ###TITLE### and the need to use TypoScript,” Georg explains. “Creating a modern successor was a clever solution.”