Steering Committee Strategical Meeting

Categories: Association Created by ben van 't ende
The Steering Committee met in Hamburg on the 4th of December at Bitfarmers for a Strategical Meeting. Oliver Hader (new core team leader) and Benni Mack (new release manager) have been invited to the meeting to participate. The structure of the Steering Committee and the TYPO3 Association as such have been discussed earlier in Karlsruhe.

Strategy

Benni tells about the past User eXperience Week (T3UXW09) and how much work can be done during such a week. We will definitely repeat these 'code sprints'. We will keep aiming TYPO3 as “The Enterprise CMS” with a focus on developers. The biggest strength of TYPO3 is that you can do almost anything with it. We will however facilitate first time users better in the future. At the User eXperience Week an introduction package was created that will allow first time users to use TYPO3 out-of-the-box. The work that has been done will also allow for the creation of other packages. The SC intends to foster the creation of packages or distributions. For the future we will aim at a suite of products that support TYPO3, but can also be used separately. FLOW3, Fluid and one could also think of PHP installer and ExtJS RTE. The Steering Committee feels we will create even larger value to our motto “Inspiring People To Share”.

Planned features for TYPO3 4.4

Direction of planned features for TYPO3 4.4 is towards migration of TYPO3 5.0.
  • A new FORM object featuring drag and drop capabilities will be introduced. The frontend will be fully accessible. Patrick Broens from Netcreators is working on that as this is being written.

  • The backend forms (TCE) will be refactored as to provide a more logical overview and have a more compact presentation.

  • Implementing features started at T3UXW09

  • Refactored CSS and new icons. New skinning API.

  • Toolbar

  • Advanced Search feature

  • Grid view representing front end layout in the backend.

  • Include Extbase extensions.

  • We expect a lot of feedback on the caching framework and that will mean changes for 4.4 as well

  • Finalise Extbase kickstarter for 4.4

  • Combine dashboard and taskcenter

Of course we can only indicate a direction here. We still depend on time people can invest in it. We are planning to have a bigger budget available for the release manager of TYPO3 Version 4 (FOUR4) as to ensure a timely release. There are also plans to improve Workspaces and DAM, but this still depends on if sponsoring can be raised for that.

Miscellaneous

  • Monthly meetings will be held about progress of the new TYPO3 Version 4.3 release. This will ensure continueity.

  • Oliver Hader will organise a Bugfixing weekend,

  • Keeping FLOW3 and Extbase in sync.

  • Content Migration Project. In spring we will discuss further how about a content migration extension from TYPO3 Version 4.4+ to TYPO3 Version 5

  • TYPO3 will be communicated better. Expect more articles about TYPO3 the coming time.

  • The Google Summer of Code had some good results. A wrap up article is in the making that will feature all that has been done. TYPO3 will apply for GSOC for the coming year as well. Ideas welcome!

  • There is a budget to fix TER bugs. Will be picked up as soon as possible.


TYPO3 Version 5

  • Jens Hoffmann will be able to dedicate significantly more time to designing the new backend interface. Still looking for Ext JS specialists to integrate it.

  • Next milestone for FLOW3 is a T3CON extension based on FLOW3 in collaboration with Punkt.de.

  • A TER (Extension Repository) team will be created to create a new TER based on FLOW3. We realise most problems are in the User Interface.

  • Work will continue simultaneously on FLOW3 and TYPO3 5

Budget

After some strategical decisions had been made the budget was discussed. Due to a rather good result of the Frankfurt Conference our financial position has improved over last year. We had a pretty good overview of what needs to be spent for the coming year, but cannot finalise the budget until all budget applications are in by mid december. Priorities for the budget are the projects like TYPO3 Version 4.x and TYPO3 Version 5. Design and JS/UI person for TYPO3 version 5 are also included now. For the security budget the Incident Handling System needs to be prioritised. There is more budget for the security team. Kasper will also receive sponsoring for the podcasts.