TYPO3 7 LTS has been out for a while. I like it. But this site is running the 6.2.x release of TYPO3. 

And that's cool. Upgrading to 7 goes pretty smoothly. It's just that some of the extensions I use aren't very compatible with TYPO3 7 LTS. 

TYPO3 7 LTS comes with that version 6 compatibility feature, but if you use it you don't get to take advantage of all of the speed improvements that come with TYPO3 7 LTS. At least that's how I understood the consequences of using the compatibility feature.

My site is fast enough - if everything is cached. I use nc_staticfilecache for that and it works amazingly well. That extension simply stores every generated page (with some exceptions) as a static HTML file that will be served whenever the URL is requested. nc_staticfilecache does basically what W3 Total Cache does on Wordpress. It allows you to serve pages faster because it converts them into plain text files which are served instead of generating each page from PHP every time the page is requested.

By the way, nc_staticfilecache has been kept very up to date. It works with older TYPO3 versions and the most recent 7 LTS release as well. It's a good solid extension and its maintainers are obviously doing a heck of a fine job. Nice extension that does a very specific job and does it perfectly.

I had some page categorization techniques that used libraries and extensions incompatible with the 7.x releases of TYPO3. So since my PHP skills aren't up to speed and I don't know how to fix things yet, I'll have to put my categorization techniques on hold until I learn how to fix the extensions I currently used. So I'll be looking for some good, and recent, tutorials on TYPO3 extension building. Maybe there's some up on YouTube.

Speaking of categorization. I want to use Solr to categorize my content. I used to, with tt_news and with pages, manually select a category or categories for everything that is published. Now I'd rather use Apache Solr to index a bunch of content from known categories and then use that as a base to index new content based on its similarity to content of known categorization.

I tried something similar with MySQL and its fulltext capabilities, and let me say, I was very impressed at how well I was able to categorize content using preexisting content that is already categorized. The SQL used in doing that is similar to how I made my related pages widget in typoscript.

That's an interesting field, document classification. Something I've read a lot about, but where I'm not sure to dive in.

So I guess mainly, my challenge for the next few weeks will be upgrading this TYPO3 install to the latest 7 LTS release. I may lose some features here and there, but I'll gain a lot too. That's life.