Community Hub Supporter in conversation: Stefan Frömken

The Community Hub for TYPO3 is a forum that I created to connect TYPO3 fans. As a platform for exchange, it brings together people who love, use and develop TYPO3. Knowledge, experience and ideas flow together here - all thanks to the financial support of dedicated Community Hub Supporters.

As a supporter, you make more than just a financial contribution. You make it possible for the TYPO3 community to network and exchange ideas. Thanks to your support, I can continue to develop and maintain the forum, which in turn benefits all TYPO3 users. Interestingly, valuable collaborations have already developed between members through the hub - a nice side effect of the mutual exchange.

In this series of interviews, I will introduce you to the people who keep the Community Hub alive with their support. You'll find out who they are, what drives them and why they are committed to TYPO3.

Today in conversation: Stefan Frömken.

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Stefan, who are you and what do you do for a living? Tell us a bit about yourself and your path, and how you came to TYPO3.

Hi, I'm Stefan and I work at jweiland.net as a bug hunter.
Okay, not quite - officially I'm a senior TYPO3 developer, but bug hunting is definitely one of my daily tasks.

I've been infected with the TYPO3 virus since TYPO3 4.0.12 and have programmed a lot of extensions. I'm probably best known for events2, maps2 and various other extensions with a "2" at the end - most of them were created as part of my work. But I've also implemented a few projects privately, including mysqlreport and, most recently, ext_kickstarter, which you can use to build your own extensions.

I've been active in the TYPO3 community for over 10 years, occasionally also in the TYPO3 core - and have experienced all the ups and downs of Extbase.

What do you offer and what is your focus? What exactly makes your offer special?

I don't really have anything to offer - well, almost. I have now updated all the Fluid View Helpers on my website https://www.typo3lexikon.de. With my own examples, no copy-paste translations from the official documentation, but instead I've developed them myself and made them practical.

How did you find out about the Community Hub?

Well...you can hardly miss the advertising from Wolfgang. Facebook, X (but probably no longer), Bluesky and LinkedIn. Oh yes, this Wolfgang also has a Twitch stream in which he repeatedly drew attention to the Community Hub.

What made you decide to support the Community Hub?

True to the motto "Inspiring People To Share", Wolfgang does a lot of things right. He doesn't keep his knowledge to himself, but actively passes it on. He always motivates me to create videos for the TYPO3 community myself. I would just like to say thank you for this support and the occasional *beep* kicks.

Is there a TYPO3 feature or extension that makes your life easier? What excites you about it?

I totally enjoy the Fluid Data Processors! It gets particularly exciting when you nest them - that makes this technology incredibly powerful.

I've also programmed my own data processors. No more annoying TypoScript fiddling! Within a Data Processor, you have direct access to the request, the site and, of course, the database. Simply get the data you need, process it as you wish and assign it to a variable. The integrator can then use it 1:1 - without having to wrap countless conditions around it.

These little helpers really tidy up everything and keep your Fluid templates lean. And that in turn helps to keep websites up-to-date in the long term.

Which project do you immediately think of when you look back on your work? What makes it special for you?

I once programmed a TYPO3 construction kit for a customer. Wow, that was a lot of work! Sure, there are other solutions - but most of them bypass TYPO3 and program completely around it. But that's exactly what I didn't want to do. I don't use TYPO3 to program around it, but to work with TYPO3.

In my solution, the entire copy logic for page tree templates is based exclusively on the TYPO3 API. I think I even managed to use all the hooks from the DataHandler. Have you had a look at how the backend forms are formatted? This is exactly the approach I used for my kit:

One file to get the PIDs
A file to copy the page tree
A file to create backend users
A file for mailing
... and so on

Thanks to this structured approach, the extension is still maintainable, clear and expandable even after more than five years. New features can still be added with reasonable effort.

In the meantime, the customer has created over 300 root pages with this construction kit - with a total of around 12,000 pages, 72,000 content elements and around 121,000 event data records. It's crazy what's possible with TYPO3!

What do you do when you're not working? What gives you energy and takes your mind off things?

In the mornings, I like to hang out in a café here in Lindlar. They already know me there. "Large cappuccino, as usual?". Nothing beats a cappuccino from a portafilter machine. Nothing to do with pressing buttons. It's still real manual work here.

I'm a member of the "Wir für Lindlar" (We for Lindlar) association and as part of this, we occasionally run around Lindlar picking up litter. We bought a small handcart with a broom, scraper, bin bags and all that stuff. Joah, so at some point I stopped counting the discarded butts.

If you could wish for something for the TYPO3 community, what would it be?

I miss the What's New slides from TYPO3. I know it was a lot of work to prepare these presentations, but they're incredibly good to show at a developer training course.

Now there are only the features in the news reports, and you have to pull the source code examples from the Feature ChangeLog. This also applies to the Deprecated and Removed clothes.

Please don't get me wrong: I'm really really happy that we have the ChangeLogs and also migration paths, but these presentations were and are a real enrichment in my eyes.

Was there a moment that really excited or surprised you while working with TYPO3?

Attention, I'm a developer - a real source code junkie. That's why I often get excited about things that others might overlook.

The other day I was browsing through the FAL API and discovered events that allow you to modify uploaded files before saving them. In other words, you can adjust the metadata or change the image dimensions before saving. TYPO3 even uses some of these events itself. For example, if you delete a file via the API, an event listener automatically ensures that all references, temporary files and image data records also disappear. Isn't that amazing? TYPO3 keeps itself clean!

And then I discovered something else: You can now overwrite all fluid templates of backend modules via PageTS Config! Thanks to such features I can do without further XCLASSes in my jwtools2 extension.

I also love the new site settings. In pure TypoScript, there were always only arrays and strings as data types. Now we have type-safe settings that we can access from almost anywhere - as soon as the site object is available. And best of all: TypoScript doesn't even have to be started for this! Whether backend, frontend or CLI - just get the site, without TSFE fiddling.

And yes, from TYPO3 14 onwards, TSFE will be history anyway.

If someone is new to TYPO3, what advice would you give them?

Don't give up. If you think that TYPO3 has rolled another stone in front of your feet, then dare to ask.

Come and visit the TYPO3 community on Slack, at a TYPO3 camp near you or in Wolfgang's forum. We're here and we're happy to help.

But: Put some effort into the question. Many of us go into a blockade mode with "Such a *PIEP* here, nothing works here". Tell us your TYPO3 versions, what you have done and what error message (including these cryptic codes) you are getting. This will open doors for us.

Is there a resource, tool or website that you would recommend to other TYPO3 users?

The TYPO3 documentation has become really good. More and more examples are being added and thanks to the new search function you can even search categorically. Via the "All Documentation" button you will find a bunch of links directly to the most important documentation. Yes, these are only available in English, but hey, even I can manage ;-)

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Many thanks to Stefan Frömken for this interview and the valuable support of the TYPO3 Community Hub. You want to know more about Stefan and his work? Then take a look:

• https://typo3lexikon.de/
• https://x.com/stefanfroemken
• https://bsky.app/profile/froemken.bsky.social

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