What could cause to me break my year long silence?  Of course its the return of a TYPO3 Conference to the Dallas, Texas area.  We’ll be back at Irving Bible Church from May 20-22 for T3CON10-Dallas.  Full details are available on the conference website, but I’d like to add a little personal information on why I think this is a valuable conference for anyone working with TYPO3 regularly.

We’ve put a lot of effort into finding the right mix of presentations for extension developers, site builders, and site administrators. The North American TYPO3 community is currently heavier on site builders and administrators than extension developers so we’ve expanded our schedule to have two tracks targeted at this larger group.  The developer track remains and has a lot of great topics this year, but we wanted to expand the schedule so that site builders and administrators have more topics to choose from.

In addition to these formal presentation, we’ve added “5 minutes of fame” and “Birds of Feather” to the schedule.  Each of these are informal times to show off your work or form small groups to to discuss common interests and ideas.  We hope these sessions connect people with one another and are a starting point for further collaboration.

Another addition to the schedule is “TYPO3 911 / Mentoring.”  The goal in these sessions is simply to work through any TYPO3 issues you may be having by pairing you up with a skilled developer or administrator. If you stop for a second and consider normal support costs, it becomes pretty clear that these sessions alone make T3CON10-Dallas worth the cost.

For any churches using Web-Empowered Church and TYPO3, we’re also offering a special WEC Day (May 19, one day prior to the conference) at the same location and staffed by the full WEC team. The exact details are still being worked out so keep an eye on WebEmpoweredChurch.org for more details.

I’m looking forward to T3CON10-Dallas and hope you’ll be able to join us. Early registration is available until March 26 and regular registration until April 30.  Be sure to sign up soon!

TYPO3 will be holding its first conference in North America from April 16-18, 2009 in Dallas, Texas. Since I live in the Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex, I’ve been involved in the organization and I’m ready to see the conference get here.  We’ve got a great lineup of speakers that will provide great content for new TYPO3 administrators and experienced developers alike. Many well known members of the TYPO3 community will be in attendance including Kasper SkÃ¥rhøj (original TYPo3 developer) and Robert Lemke (TYPo3 v5 developer). In addition to the technical content, I’m really looking forward to establishing connections within the North American community of TYPO3 developers.

If you’re still on the fence about attending, I’ll promise visits to the best Tex-Mex and Barbecue spots that Dallas has to offer.  Registration is open now at http://t3con09-dallas.typo3.org/visitors.html and early bird pricing is available until the end of February so don’t wait around.