TYPO3 Upgrade (CISO Alliance)
Customer location:
Germany
Duration
March - April 2024
Services
TYPO3 CMS Upgrade, Back-End, Hosting and ongoing maintenance
Key technologies
TYPO3 CMS
The Client
CISO Alliance is a German based organization dedicated to collaboration among Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and related professionals. Their community-driven platform serves as a hub for sharing knowledge, resources, and best practices in the field. The CISO Alliance pursues its goal as an open community platform for experts in IT security, that aims to strengthen the CISO role and support CISOs in their efforts to protect information security.
Request
CISO Alliance approached us with the objective of upgrading its existing TYPO3 CMS based web platform from version 9.5 LTS to the latest version at that moment - 12.4 LTS. The upgrade itself needed to leverage the latest features, to enhance security, and to improve overall performance.
Additionally, the client reported an issue with the main contact form, noting that some customers’ inquiries were not being successfully received by them, and a second issue related to the hosting provider, and overall slow maintenance experience.
How important is TYPO3 Upgrade / Update?
First of all let’s break through what the TYPO3 Upgrade procedure looks like in general?
TYPO3 Upgrade is a process initiated by client or suggested by DevTeam beforehand, properly estimated by how many efforts are needed to finish it and as a result performed by the team in order to keep the website running most up-to-date software and to keep it secure and future-proofed at the end.
Every Upgrade project won’t be started without a proper estimation which involves several engineers (at least one for estimating the project and one to review an estimate), this process usually takes around couple of days and gives our clients quite detailed info of what exactly will be done during an Upgrade, what are the breaking changes in the codebase that needs to be refactored, the step-by-step plan of each phase of the upgrade and total amount of time that needs to be involved to perform successful TYPO3 Upgrade.
From DevTeam point of view, we can split the Upgrade process into 3 basic phases:
- upgrading Core
- upgrading Vendor Dependencies (plugins, other community extensions)
- upgrading Project’s own codebase that rely on Core and Vendor packages + possible Database Migrations and Post-Upgrade procedures, in some cases also upgrade of environmental dependencies like php and database etc.
While the first two steps are mostly quite straightforward, the third one is where the most efforts are put on (especially on an old installations).
This means the complexity of the codebase (amount of implemented business logic, code written with no standards, avoiding recommended by TYPO3 approaches, using unstable plugins even for very simple logic etc.), as well as how outdated current TYPO3 version is, increases the time needed to perform an Upgrade.
Now is the time to emphasize how important is to select right Team to develop your website and lead you on your path of digital presence, as when everything is done right from the beginning you win in the maintaining costs later and have a future-proofed business tool that works for you!
What is the difference between Update / Upgrade?
While there is no strict differentiation, it’s quite common to name Upgrade the procedure when you migrate your project on new TYPO3 major version e.g. your project is currently running 12.4 LTS and you would like to have 13.4 LTS. However, when you stay on the same major version e.g. 12.4 but would like to use it’s latest possible version e.g. 12.4.28 LTS or migrate to latest ELTS version such procedure is called Update.
TYPO3 Update is a much simpler process and usually does not take too much efforts.
What you get with TYPO3 Upgrade?
Regular updates of software your website is running on is crucial for a several reasons:
- Enhanced Security. Older TYPO3 versions may have vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Upgrading ensures you have the latest security patches to protect your website and any personal data from potential threats.
- Improved Performance. Newer versions often come with performance improvements, ensuring your website runs smoothly and efficiently, providing a better user experience.
- Access to New Features. Each TYPO3 update introduces new functionalities and optimizations that enhance user-friendliness and system usage, benefiting both editors and developers.
- Improved User Experience. An outdated TYPO3 version might lack the intuitive navigation, mobile responsiveness, and modern design elements that users expect. Upgrading ensures your website delivers the most up-to-date User Experience.
- Legal Compliance. Keeping your TYPO3 system up-to-date ensures compliance with data protection regulations, reducing legal risks associated with outdated software.
Solution for CISO Alliance
CISO Alliance’s platform is essential for connecting information security professionals. With this in mind, our TYPO3 upgrade approach which guarantees the lowest downtime during an upgrade and professional Quality Assurance beforehand was the perfect fit for their needs.
The upgrade process involved migration from TYPO3 version 9.5 LTS to the version 12.4 LTS.
The project was divided into multiple phases:
Estimation & Investigation
Client has come to us with an existing project which was completely unknown to us at first. Our team conducted a comprehensive assessment of the existing TYPO3 setup to identify potential challenges and ensure compatibility with the latest TYPO3 version. Detailed upgrading plan was prepared, which included identification of the breaking changes in the codebase that was required to refactor, which vendor extensions and other dependencies needs update, as well as migration procedures to be performed on corresponding environments. As a result the client was completely informed about work that will be performed and exact amount of time that will be needed.
Development
After the client's approval of an estimate we have started the development phase. Project didn’t use git and composer so that is the place we have started. Then, Core extensions upgrade, Vendor packages revision and upgrade. The next step was to refactor the codebase in places where TYPO3 breaking changes had an affect. Each TYPO3 version from 9.5 to 12.4 was taken into consideration. Most important TYPO3 changes like Symfony DI, PSR-14 Events, Site Settings Handling, new composer-installers support which brings additional level of security and much more were used to keep the installation up-to-date, secure and efficient.
Quality Assurance
The next important phase is Testing. We’ve prepared detailed testing protocol that was used by our QA specialists to properly test the installation on a UAT environment and make sure it’s ready to be launched.
System Healthiness Check
During the QA phase we have rechecked general healthiness of the environment where the website is running, make sure all needed environment components like (SMTP configurations, Cron, ImageMagic) are properly used and working.
Deployment - Launch day
The final step was the most important - the Launch day. After intensive testing and all the approvals we have planned a day of release. Domains were reconfigured to a new TYPO3 12.4 LTS running environment when everything was already prepared which made possible to avoid any downtime between switching from old website to a new one.
Additional request - Hosting
Additional issue was related to an existing hosting provider, and overall slow maintenance experience. We have proposed our Website Maintenance package which includes usage of Raccoon Depot’s infrastructure. It’s secure, scalable infrastructure based in the EU, minimal downtime, 24/7 monitoring, and instant reaction of our technical specialists in case of any issues to recover a website functionality. This gave our customer a stable performance of CISO Alliance website.
Additional request - Contact Form
As we wrote earlier, the client reported issue with their main contact form, noting that some customer inquiries were not being successfully received by them. By the deep investigation we have found that the form was previously written by pure PHP approach without usage of any TYPO3 APIs. This was needed to be refactored immediately. In order to keep the codebase stable and future-proofed we have used TYPO3 Form Framework API’s, which gave the customer an opportunity to control all inquiries as well as the form itself through the TYPO3 backend. This improved the stability of communication (no more lost emails from end users) and gave us opportunity to control this flow and instantly react if any.
Conclusions
Helping CISO Alliance upgrade their TYPO3 platform was more than just a technical task, it was about making sure their website stays fast, secure, and easy to manage in the future. We handled everything step by step, with clear communication and a solid upgrade plan, so the whole process went smoothly and without any possible issues.
