Extbase Grows Up

Categories: Development Created by Sacha Storz

Thanks to the innovative work of the FLOW3/Phoenix team much has happened since the presentation of the first version of Extbase at the 2009 TYPO3 Snowboard Tour.

Thanks to the innovative work of the FLOW3/Phoenix team, and to the contribution and feedback of hundreds of busy enthusiasts, much has happened since Jochen Rau and Sebastian Kurfürst presented a first version of Extbase at the 2009 TYPO3 Snowboard Tour. We're not exaggerating when we claim that Extbase* and Fluid* have changed the way most developers build TYPO3 extensions today.

With the sudden success of Extbase, the focus has shifted slightly to solving mainly technical issues. The parts of Extbase that didn’t get much attention are becoming increasingly important. For instance, the lack of clear communication and documentation has made it difficult for people to approach the project and has been a major source of misunderstandings.

Recently the Extbase team discussed this topic and then included the whole TYPO3 core team. In May we started to host regular public meetings (<link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v4-mvc wiki meetings _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-mvc/wiki/Meetings). But unfortunately we haven't been able to improve the situation as much as we had hoped. Although we discovered a lot of energy and helpfulness out there, we realized we were missing the resources necessary to harness that energy effectively. Therefore we decided to restructure the Extbase team.

Patrick Lobacher offered his help and he will take over the leadership of the project. Patrick is considered the unofficial "Extbase Evangelist” (he even printed Extbase T-shirts!). Although Patrick has a comprehensive knowledge of the project, he hasn't been extensively involved in the technical aspects. This allows him to keep track of the big picture. He will focus on the coordination of important sub projects such as a microsite on typo3.org, code sprints, the Extbase book translation (<link http: forge.typo3.org projects book_extbase_fluid _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/book_Extbase_fluid), and improved communication and documentation.

Sebastian and Bastian will, of course, continue to be in charge of the code, making sure that Extbase remains in sync with FLOW3.

The success of Extbase wouldn't have been possible without the help and support of the large Extbase Team for the last three years. Over these years the team continued to grow as more people became interested in Extbase and we are all grateful for their hard work. However, it has become clear that for Extbase to continue to flourish, the decision-making process and the ownership of the various sub-projects needs to be streamlined. To that end, the membership of the core Extbase team is reorganizing so that each team member has ownership and responsibility for the completion of specific projects.

The size of the Extbase team will be decreased over the next few months, leaving only active members in the team. This will provide a solid foundation for cooperation and development of Extbase. Membership of the Extbase team will be coupled to obligations. This will enable the team to work much more closely together, to depend on each other, and to have more clarity on the progress of Extbase. By streamlining the Extbase team we hope to better facilitate current users of Extbase as well as to introduce new users to the extension.

Extbase has become an essential part of the current TYPO3 branch and showcases how the current TYPO3 version benefits from the development of our next generation CMS, Phoenix, based on FLOW3.

The Extbase team needs dedicated manpower and maybe your sponsoring for future code sprints. Let us know what you think.

* Extbase is a backport of FLOW3, the PHP framework on which TYPO3 5.0 will be built. It can be used as base for your extensions and enables you to make use of some of the new paradigms and features of FLOW3 (http://flow3.typo3.org/) already today.

* Fluid is a flexible and extensible Templating-Engine that is easy to learn, yet much more powerful than the marker-based approach. Fluid is the default Templating system for Extbase and FLOW3.

* Extbase and Fluid are integrated into the core distribution of TYPO3 since version 4.3.

(Thank you Bill Tenny-Brittian for proofreading)