TYPO3 has announced the discontinuation of TYPO3 CMS 4.7 and TYPO3 CMS 6.1. Both versions reached their end of life in in October 2014. Their latest versions are 4.7.20 and 6.1.12 which were released two weeks ago mark the last ones in these branches.
TYPO3 is encouraging its users to upgrade to the latest LTS version TYPO3 CMS 6.2, which they believe serves as the best basis for existing and new sites running with TYPO3 CMS. Only recently has TYPO3 updated their release cycle process which also gives us a glimpse of what to expect with TYPO3 CMS 7 and beyond.
The next release iteration towards the coming LTS will have regular releases with a better migration strategy striving for a smooth migration during upgrades. So the next release will be called 7.0 and be released in November 2014. It will contain a lot of cleanups and minor improvements already made in the past months. From there on you can expect a new version to be released every few months or even weeks - each of these will focus on a certain goal which has been prioritized based on feedback from the community and the assessment of the Active Contributors.
Every release is based on the proven workflow of a merge window which is then followed by a stabilization phase - very much like the “big” releases you know now, just scaled down to be quicker.
At a certain point around fall 2015 the release manager will define when the current status is ready to be tagged as a LTS release.
From here on out it will be handled just like any other LTS release we had in the past with a full three years of support on security fixes and critical bugfixes.
Once 7 LTS is released, we will kick off the CMS 8 branch with the same release strategy so we can work in a faster way and get more improvements on the road quicker.
TYPO3 CMS 7 main focus is toward providing a better user experience for editors, a leaner and more flexible code base and optimized best practices default when setting up websites. A lot of those usability improvements will be in the backend thanks to a large part of rebuilding the code from the ground up using Twitter Bootstrap.
Doing so will enable TYPO3 to implement a lot of usability improvements more rapidly, get rid of a lot of legacy code, be ensure better compatibility with modern browsers.