Whatever language you speak and country you work in, your web agency’s needs will be the same. T3kit is a collaborative inter-agency website package combining decades of TYPO3 experience in one open source project. The first TYPO3 v9 LTS-compatible release is expected within weeks.
T3kit has changed the way we do business. While many agencies hold their “magic sauce” close to their chest, choosing collaboration over competition on a business-critical technology has become a major success factor.
“Going Open Source has Only Positives”
“It is easy to think you are always doing the best,” says Pixelant’s chief TYPO3 developer, Mattias Nilsson. “Open-sourcing our website starter kit means other people can help you improve. We have learned a lot from cooperating with other agencies with different perspectives.”
t3kit was started by combining Pixelant’s ten years of TYPO3 experience and best-practices into a single website package. Quickly, more agencies joined the projects as partners. TYPO3 agencies dkd (Germany) and Web Essentials (Cambodia) brought in their own code and best-practice answers to common problems.
“We get a lot of pull requests and new features from other contributors too,” says Mattias. “Anyone can join the project on Github, and we have an open session in the #t3kit channel on TYPO3 Slack every Friday at 10:30am CET, where anyone can join and ask questions or come with requests.”
Quick Results Will Make Your Customers Feel Safe
We use t3kit for TYPO3 sites of any size, and it streamlines both the sales process and the project. As an agency you can allow your clients to grow within the same package.
“t3kit makes it possible to deliver cost-effective solutions. Rolling out a new site can take just a couple of hours,” says Robert Lindh, Pixelant’s head of sales. “Instead of saying ‘we will build this,’ we can show the customer a feature-rich site instead. For customers, it removes a lot of insecurity about the project.”
Robert continues by explaining how a good basis to work from also opens up for a more iterative and agile process with the customer: “Instead of making really big projects, you can lower the scope and deliver something fast and then add more features iteratively.”
Saving Agencies Time and Avoiding Bugs
The t3kit framework includes extensions preconfigured with best-practice settings and styles:
Frontend Editing,
Georg Ringer’s News extension,
Apache Solr-based search, and
A number of other third-party extensions
“Because everything is standardized, we have reduced the amount of hours spent on basic site implementation, and it has had a positive effect on our finances. We also produce fewer bugs,” says Mattias.
TYPO3 v9 LTS Compatibility Within Weeks
Work is underway to make the final parts of t3kit version 8 compatible with TYPO3 v9 LTS, and the first release is only weeks away.
“The point of this version is to have the same functionality in TYPO3 v9 LTS as we have in v8 LTS,” says Mattias Nilsson. “Then we will start work on a new t3kit version especially for TYPO3 v9 LTS, introducing new technology and getting the framework even closer to the TYPO3 core.”
Coming: Speed and Accessibility With AMP and Bootstrap 4
Mattias says a number of speed and accessibility improvements are coming to t3kit v9: “AMP is a real gamechanger, and we are bringing it to t3kit. We are also looking at how the enhancements in Bootstrap 4 can make accessibility even better. We will also reduce the number of dependencies to increase speed.”
Apart from compatibility with the new site configuration and search engine-friendly URL routing features in TYPO3 v9 LTS, Mattias and the t3kit team are looking into a number of new features:
Improved minifiers for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
Introducing the market-leading Yoast SEO TYPO3 extension
Introducing DDEV support
Improving the language menu
Offering an alternate, smaller example site database
Interested in t3kit?
Read more about t3kit and download it from Github.
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