The weekend of the 24th/25th of may the first gathering of HCI (Human Computer Interface Team) took place @ Netcreators HQ in Arnhem.
Those attending were:
- Jens Hoffmann - The leader of HCI and redesigner of TYPO3.org
- Michiel Roos - Release Manager of DAM, author of the fabulous nc_staticfilecache extension
- Steffen Kamper - The musician and TYPO3 coder
- Patrick Broens - Core developer, author of pb_survey and docheader specialist
- Benni Mack - Core Developer, HCI Co-Leader, responsible for the ajaxed pagetree, DAM developer
- ben van 't ende - Organiser, Motivator, Content Rendering Group
- Daan, Suze, Sam - Ben 's kids @ parallel session checking out usable games
Special thanks goes out to Willem Genevace who provided the team with a community contribution by means of a barbeque featuring Forellen (Trouts). The title of the article (Trouts are HOT) reflects the spirit we were in and the enthousiasm we had working together. So don't get funny thoughts about trouts ;-)
The team is using <link http: forge.typo3.org projects show hci>TYPO3 Forge as its communication platform. It features a bugtracker, WIKI, news and several other features (check out the “Also available in: PDF” option!) using <link http: www.redmine.org>Redmine. The members of the team are seasoned usability experts and dedicated to the goal of bringing usability to the backend. Less is more!
On friday we had a preliminary session deciding what we were going to do. Saturday for bugfixing and Sunday for t3skin. As it turned out we did not have any time for fixing stuff for t3skin. One thing that is picked up by Michiel are the stylesheets styling the backend. There are about 60 of them loaded on every request. Aim of this is to have a unified stylesheet that only needs to be loaded once. That would be a huge speed improvement. Initial test I have seen lower access times to the backend 50%. Michiel has written an extensive document about backend and frontend responsiveness that will be published on TYPO3.org.
Friday evening featured an Indian Foodfest provided by Lydia. Almost all Netcreators were present. Food was spicy and perfect.
On saturday morning Steffen also arrived and we discussed Jens’ PDF, now called the “evil PDF”. Every issue in there got assigned to someone in the team and was added to the HCI bugtracker on Forge. This already took more than 2 hours. After that it was bugfixing. Of course issues assigned 10 minutes of work turned out to be more like an hour. Well that is the way things go. We worked until about 20.00.
Saturday evening featured Willem’s BBQ with “geile Forellen”. We discussed many remaining issues and the state of the TYPO3 community.
Sunday was bugfixing again. <link http: forge.typo3.org reports issue_report hci>10 out of 30 bugs were solved this weekend. Benni got assigned with a special mission to check out how Kasper originally implemented top-apps (the apps in the top navigation).
We concluded our session in the just opened restaurant Goed where we had some nice burnt pizzas. The rest of the issues will be dealt with the coming weeks. For a next meeting we definitely need more time. A similar meeting to this one is already planned for DAM, featuring almost the same guys.
What remains is to mention the “ugly PDF” by Uschi Renziehausen. Check out <link http: forge.typo3.org projects hci documents>forge.typo3.org/projects/hci/documents for this. Do not be shy to participate. If you have any issues just add them to our project page.
The future vision of HCI is to have the backend fully templated. It is the preference of HCI to use Smarty for that as proven technology. For one of the coming releases, maybe like TYPO3 4.5, we would like to have a totally different backend that is more usable and that looks more sexy. Consensus is that we should not stay behind the current state of webbased applications.
