Report on codesprint Karlsruhe 3.3-6.3.16

Categories: Development Created by Anja Leichsenring
Another codesprint took place, preparing for the first release of the v8 series.
Some TYPO3 Core Developers and a whole bunch of interested contributors met for four days in Karlsruhe at <link https: www.flagbit.de loesungen system-und-technologie typo3.html>Flagbit to pave the path for the first release of TYPO3 v8.
In total, 21 people managed to merge round about 80 patches to master, not counting bug fixes and improvements applied to the stable branches 7.6 and 6.2. With this amount of activity, we pressed the number of open and pending patches well below 200!
The focus was to improve the backend layout towards a more consistent and intuitive look and feel. Some patches in this regard have been merged, but more energy was put into peripheral aspects. The introduction package and the dependent bootstrap package are now ready for the v8.0 release. Unfortunately, it turned out realurl is not ready for this early sprint release. In order to ship a working introduction package anyway, realurl as a dependency has thus been dropped for the time being.
The "form" extension got quite some love with TYPO3 CMS version 7 already, especially from the great people at Tritum. Three of them joined us in Karlsruhe to further improve this part of TYPO3. As a remarkable milestone it should be mentioned that editors can now use predefined forms registered by an integrator. The form wizard is now directly integrated within the editing view and no standalone component any longer to further improve the editing experience.These features will be part of TYPO3 v8.
Another big chunk of work is worth mentioning: Since version 6.0, a continuing effort provides automated tests for the Core, automatically executed on every patch that is merged by the service of Travis CI. It started with unit tests in version 6.0, with 6.2 functional tests were introduced. With v8 we will see acceptance tests based on codeception and the selenium server entering the stage. The environment is ready and a small group of contributors is busy to provide tests and build up best practices for all of us to use and learn from. This new test suite will verify no new patches destroy the functionality of the backend on a rather high level.
Naturally, when passionate people gather, a lot of discussion arises. This sprint was no execption. Some highly technical and architectural decision have been tackled and decided upon. It is a pleasure on its own to watch our lead architects taking over the whiteboard and engage in heated discussion. 
The majority of sprint participants engaged into what we call casual patch handling. This means we go through the open reviews and pick everything that seems halfway ready. Then, for each of those issues, we strive to move it forward until it is ready to be merged. During this process a lot of new issues may turn up and are fixed on the go, too. This is the kind of work that keeps a group of devs busy at their laptops for 12 hours straight. It is the Flow, this visible process, the feeling of success. In average, we started coding at 10am and generally did not quit before 11pm. Meanwhile our hoster flagbit didn't let us starve. It has been a pleasure to spend those days in Karlsruhe.
After everybody is back home now, the stablisation phase for v8 started. Expect the release two weeks later, if no blockers turn up. In case you are interested in helping out, testing and reporting bugs on the first sprint release of v8, check out the master branch and test it to its limits. This sprint release will be stable and usable in production (if you feel lucky) and will be supported until the release of v8.1.
TYPO3 v8 - miles ahead.