TYPO3 Phoenix and FLOW3 - February 2012

Categories: Development Created by Karsten Dambekalns

After the massive amount of newsworthy things in January, the February turned out to be a little less intense when it comes to new things. Nevertheless work on Phoenix and FLOW3 continued full scale, only slowed down a little by T3BOARD12 at the end of the month…

Phoenix

Although some seem to think otherwise, the user base of Phoenix continues to grow. Aside from some projects done by external people, we set up a Phoenix website for the T3CON12 in Québec the first bi-lingual Phoenix website ever. Bastian continued to improve the conference management plugin. Other event websites likely will follow, as will improvements to the FLOW3 website. Those use cases provide an important feedback loop on the state of Phoenix.

Markus concluded his research into JavaScript tree libraries and settled for dynatree as the library of choice. He has been working on integrating this into the Phoenix user interface and is currently waiting for some TYPO3CR improvements to finish this up.

Sebastian - with the help of Christopher and others - continued to work on the TypoScript rendering concept. A number of new concepts were developed far enough to give a nice presentation during T3BOARD12 - including live demonstration of the examples. The codebase needs cleanup and some of the naming will be polished before it can be merged but apart from that we have a fully working TypoScript parsing and rendering concept as powerful as ever!

The module framework implementation Aske had been working on in January was merged, and in the light of that we discussed the use of Bootstrap for the non-WYSIWYG parts of the Phoenix user interface. We decided to give it a try and see how it works for the setup wizard - but it is very likely we'll adopt it for the whole product.

Aske set out to work on a new task right away… After some brainstorming he started to analyze a lot of setup tools found in other system and created a ticket for our own wizard before starting to code. It will allow easy installation of Phoenix, so that one can start editing content after a few simple steps. This will lower the entry barrier we currently have massively.

The snowboard tour participants had the chance to see a presentation on some impressive Aloha improvements, topped by an (experimental) integration of Aloha Wikidocs into TYPO3 Phoenix - bringing collaboration to the content editing.

Of course we also did such trivial things as fixing bugs…

FLOW3

The work on the HTTP framework Robert started was continued during February and complemented by refactorings and a major cleanup in the MVC stack of FLOW3. Because of this, dozens if not hundreds of tests where revisited and cleaned up. The changes allow for much easier testing (both unit and functional testing) with less mock objects, so that a lot of the tests are now cleaner, shorter and more stable. The work is in the final stages of being completed as I write this.

Work on the code migration tool continued with adjustments to the Scisr refactoring tool which is used to do the heavy lifting - it needs to get namespace support. Refactorings like renaming classes already work as planned, including commits of the result to git and the needed checks for a clean working copy.

The use of authentication was simplified by removal of the default configuration for authentication providers - it got in the way more than it helped. This made the login of Phoenix work again, much to the joy of our IRC channel audience… :)

Something that is close to being publicly announced is a Form API for FLOW3, that Bastian and Sebastian worked on the last two months. And it will not only be an API - a full interactive form builder has been developed on top of that. All in all an exciting addition to FLOW3 that provides a huge building block for TYPO3 Phoenix - just think of it as "the TCA refactoring done done."

In the middle of all that work, we released FLOW3 1.0.3, another bugfix release resolving a small number of issues.

This and that

Bastian further worked on the toolchain to generate documentation for ViewHelpers (and other artifacts) automatically from their code documentation,first results will be followed by integration into the documentation pages on the FLOW3 website.

Rens worked on documentation as well, extracting our rendering tool from the documentation package. Next up: find a new home for that, ideally in cooperation with the TYPO3 Documentation Team. Another task Rens tackled was to set up a Windows system to test FLOW3 against, kudos for being an inveterate enemy to all the (symlink handling) oddities encountered.

The IRC channel again saw a lot of activity and Christian has been playing Friendly Ghost almost 24/7 - thanks a lot!

Our tries to marry the way FLOW3 handles XLIFF files with the TYPO3 Pootle server were not giving us the expected results - sadly Pootle doesn't cope with the file layout we have chosen. There are multiple ways to solve this, which we need to evaluate before taking a decision. Oh, the joys of interdependencies…

During the snowbard tour the participating members of the team not only coded, but also enjoyed lots of sunshine, snow and beer^W beverages, before going to bed late^Wearly every day… And we published an announcement following a related blog post that caused impressive ripples.

The TYPO3 Association's General Assembly in Basel ended with another budget for the Phoenix project being approved - details on that will be explained in a seperate news post.

The team brainstormed about possible topics for the T3DD12 in Munich and handed in a number of workshop proposals - stay tuned for the schedule announcement, we hope to be able to bring you a whole stack of Phoenix goodness!

The End

That's it for February. Now on with March… stay tuned!