A short history of Flownative

After longer than we thought the Neos team did release the result of a fundamental effort – and we helped until the very last moment.

Robert wrote a bit about it in his post Neos 9.0 Vienna Sprint.

With Markus our team has gained valuable expertise in development, both frontend and backend. But Markus is also a long-time member of the Neos community and a great person.

Ten years have passed since we founded Flownative. Our goal was to promote Flow and Neos and help it's wonderful community.

We have come a long way – and look forward to the coming years!

After years of learning and months of putting all that knowledge to work this year saw a soft launch of a completely new underpinning for our Flownative Bach hosting platform. Hosted in Germany, no GDPR issues, no fuzz.

With support for PHP 8 available in Beach since 2021 and the release of Neos 8.0, it seems eight is the lucky number.

For the first time since we launched Beach we make adjustments to our pricing model, based on how our customers use Beach today and what is planned for the future.

Skipping version 6 in good PHP tradition helped us align version numbering in the Neos & Flow universe. But there is more, read Seven Up!

The management system and user interface of Flownative Beach is a project based on the Flow Framework. More than 3.000 hours of thinking and coding culminated in winning an award at the Neos Conference 2019!

Beach, our cloud-based hosting tailored to fit Neos and Flow is made publicly available. It comes with a 30-day free trial, so why don't you give it a spin as well?

Of course it supports Neos 4.0 right away…

After a herculean effort by the whole team in general and our Christian in particular (he was the release manager) another major release of Neos and Flow was done.

Read more about it in the release announcement.

After the first Neos Conference in 2017 we decided to support the Neos Conference 2018 again (read our blog post about it) again. And after the 2018 conference we decided to support the Neos Conference 2019, to be happening in beautiful Dresden, again.

The Neos Foundation CIC is backing the Neos project as a legal entity. It serves as a central point to collect funding and finance various project activities. In addition it holds the projects assets, like trademarks and right to the logo.

Read the announcement and why a CIC was chosen.

Another year has passed and Flownative is now two years old! We continued to solve issues in projects small and large, invested hundreds of hours into Neos and Flow. And we kept having fun! Which, we think, is good.

The two releases represent a major effort of the Neos community and are a reason to celebrate. Read more about it in the release announcement.

It was about time, so in April Flownative became a Gold subscription sponsor of the Neos project.

Flownative turns 1 in February. The year was a very motivating journey for us. And we dare to think we managed to help our customers a lot when it comes to delivering successful projects.

Neos 2.1 is released in December 2015. It contains major new features, including shared workspaces, the possibility to have changes reviewed before publication and a vastly improved way of rendering and handling thumbnails for assets.

In August Neos 2.0 is released. With this release and the contained features, improvements and bug fixes, Neos becomes a greatly matured CMS - or a Content Application Platform as we see it.

Karsten, Robert and Christian join forces and found Flownative. Venturing into unknown territory they combine their passion for code, the love for the community and the desire to foster adoption of Neos and Flow.

During the year two more minor releases of Neos packed with features and bug fixes are done. In between some patch level releases are packaged as well.

A number of release parties around the globe–including as far away as India–are organized in December to celebrate the release of the first stable Neos release ever done.

Along with it, the underlying framework is renamed to Flow with the release of version 2.0.

Back then the framework is still named FLOW3, and in October the first stable version of it was released.

Getting into the project in 2010 Christian instantly falls in love with the coding style and decides to join the team. Shortly afterwards becoming the Community Contact for the Neos team.

After already having worked with Robert for years, Karsten takes the plunge and starts to work full time on the project. Backed by the TYPO3 Association both can fully focus on research and development.

Following roughly a year of research into different programming languages and frameworks, from Smalltalk to Spring, Robert starts with the first bits of what will eventually become Flow and Neos.

Members of the TYPO3 core team meet in northern Denmark for a week of discussions around the future of the TYPO3 project. A plan is made to radically refactor TYPO3 into a new version.