A while ago, while discussing the Neos roadmap, Gina Steiner, Christian Müller and me speculated about what would be possible, if we only had the funds to let 5-6 people of the core team work for a whole month on Neos. Fast forward to November: through a budget granted by the TYPO3 Association we were able to finance a significant amount of time from key developers at regular hourly rates to work on important features for Neos 1.3. Fourteen team members have been involved in total, some of them working almost full time. In the course of this three-week-sprint, they delivered features which usually would have taken more than half a year.
You might wonder what we have been working on all of November? Here are the highlights among the many more small and large improvements in version 1.3.
Security Framework
Andreas Förthner has been working on a Security Framework 2.0 for TYPO3 Flow for more than a year already. During this November sprint he, together with Bastian Waidelich and Rens Admiraal, finished the new system which provides all kinds of rights-related features in Neos. Version 1.3 will allow you to define access-restricted areas of your website and create frontend user logins. Through the new policy system, you can define which group of Neos users may access or modify which parts of your website. You can restrict modifications to specific content types or languages; or even limit access to custom properties which you defined for specific node types.
Localised User Interface
Henjo Hoeksma leads the effort to create a fully translated Neos user interface. Many aspects are to be considered here, since text is contained almost everywhere, like Fluid templates, Node Type property labels, Javascript libraries, Handlebar templates and much more. Each of those ask for their individual technical solution. We are proud that you can already try out Neos 1.3 (dev-master) in several languages today! (Translations for different languages are coordinated via the Crowdin platform.)
History
Ever wondered what other editors have been doing on your Neos site since you logged in last time? Sebastian Kurfürst implemented a new History module which shows key actions in a nice timeline. By now we can display actions related to nodes and users, but much more data is captured and additional views are planned for the future.
Asset Management
Ever saw me talking about "The New Resource Management" at a conference? Chances are that you did, even 1-2 years ago. And that's exactly when I started creating the 2.0 version of Flow's resource management, making it cloud-capable and more modular. The new resource management allows for using various storages for your assets, be it local storages like the file system, or remote ones like Amazon S3 or a remote file system. Assets then can published automatically to publishing targets. And these can as well be local, like the filesystem, or, for example, a Content Delivery Network. The new mechanisms are fully transparent to the developer and are almost fully downwards compatible.
Based on the new resource management, Christian Müller and I created a major re-write of the TYPO3.Media package. Following concepts of software like Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, we created an API which allows you to non-destructively manipulate images and automatically create and maintain thumbnails.
The new resource management has been completed will be part of Neos 1.3 and the next major version of TYPO3 Flow.
