As you might have already read on news.typo3.org a team was formed, that works on workspace improving it in several areas.
TYPO3 Developer Days
At T3DD10 a workshop about workspaces was held by Oliver Hader. The Workspace Team is excited to have attracted some new members while participating in the workshop. The workshop-participants combinedly worked in groups on different parts of workspaces.
The first group started new documentation. At the moment there is hardly any documentation around, which is definitely necessary for such a complex system. The group split and updated the existing information about workspaces from "Inside TYPO3" and decided to extract this information into at least three separate workspace documents. The idea is basically to have one document for every target group. One for the end-user, one for the administrator and a third aimed at developers.
A second group worked on existing bugs, cleaning up the bug tracker, marking duplicates or outdated bugs as well as reviewing and even committing fixes.
The third group initiated an extension API in order to provide the non-extbase developers with the knowledge and documentation to support workspaces in their own extension.
The fourth group discussed remaining work on the new custom stages feature. Until now, there are pre defined stages in the workspaces work flow.
For future versions of workspaces the team aims to have any number of configurable stages anywhere between "Edit" and "Ready to publish" in order to represent a companies organisational structure. The configuration of these custom stages can be managed in the workspace configuration. A working prototype has already been integrated into a development branch of TYPO3.
Team communication
Motivated by the spirit of the Developer Days two weeks ago there had been a first team Skype meeting this last Tuesday. Besides precisely defining the tasks that lay ahead, providing everyone with a task and setting up deadlines we decided that all our communication and task-management (bugs, to do's, documentation, extension api, .) will be stored on forge within the already existing project typo3v4-workspaces[1].
Please report bugs, issues and feature requests belonging to workspaces at the issue tracker on forge. The already existing bugs will still be handled on bugs.typo3.org, but referenced on forge.
Furthermore there has been a decision to meet every second week on Skype to discuss current work, progress and the next steps.
Future goals
The next steps on the way to TYPO3 4.5 are finishing the work we began at the T3DD10. A major task is refactoring the existing code, and working on usability with the TYPO3 design team. On the long run, the goals of the workspace team will be to have a better documentation and to simplify the workspaces feature for everyone, the developer, the administrator and, of course, the end user.
To reach our goals we organize two Code Sprints at July 31th and end of September.
If you want to help out developing, documenting or any other kind of support you are highly appreciated to join our forge project and/or team-meeting.
The next Team-Meeting will take place on August 3th, 6pm.
Sponsoring
If you are a company that uses workspaces or a company that implements workspaces, we would like you to consider sponsoring the development of the workspaces project. The members of the team put in a lot of their spare time. Just contact Sonja or Ben if you are willing to sponsor part of the development or maybe even the pizza dinner we have while coding.