The who and when and what
At times the Extbase Team seemed like a one man show in the last couple of months. Felix worked hard to get things going, but of course he cannot do everything on his own. That’s why several responsibilities, like budget application, time slot scheduling (for pair programming), screen cast planing etc. will now be taken over by other team members.
In order to inspire knowledge transfer within the team, the possibility of ad hoc virtual pair programming sessions has been discussed. A general problem for loose teams is: Knowledge silos are likely to occur when not each and everyone can be part of what’s happening codewise at all times. Agile approaches make use of pair programming (like in XP) to prevent that from happening. It is not as easy to do that virtually/online, but it’s not uncommon and improves knowledge distribution within the team, so it’s a good way to increase the "<link http: en.wikipedia.org wiki bus_factor>truck factor".
Code Sprint in July in Stuttgart
In July a code sprint was done in Stuttgart at the Lightwerk offices. Lightwerk also sponsored barbecue and drinks, Anja Leichsenring of ab-softlab sponsored coffee, thanks again for that. The team grew substantially for the code sprint which is great news and the sprint was a wonderful opportunity for everyone to get to know one another. The agenda of the code sprint can be found in the <link http: wiki.typo3.org ecs12s in typo3>TYPO3 wiki. The sprint mainly worked on stabilizing Extbase in itself and concerning the TYPO3 core though.Part of the agenda was to discuss a solution for extending extbase models with mixins. Some steps have been taken to achieve a stable solution. If you are interested in the findings, have a look <link http: forge.typo3.org issues issue tracker at>here at Forge. This work was not completely finished though in order to attend to other issues like stabilizing and bugfixing of existing code. So the team decided that mixins will not be part of 6.0. Especially the huge number of bugs closed and patches merged makes the Stuttgart code sprint a great success, even though not an abundant number of new features was developed. Check out the <link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v4-mvc issues issue>issue tracker if you are interested in the details.
We cannot encourage you enough to consider taking part in such sprints and/or the team activity, every help would be appreciated big time.
Next steps...
Working with other teams is vital in the TYPO3 community, especially because things are interwoven at such a basic level (think of security, persistence, Extbase/FLOW3 etc.). Anja Leichsenring of the Extbase Team will seek closer cooperation with Andi Förthner (security guru on the FLOW3 team) and the FLOW3 Team in general to streamline an overall security framework applicable for Extbase too.<link http: typo3.org news article typo3-association-budget-applications-for-2012 association budget application>Budget applications are still on and the Extbase Team will apply for a budget again used for code sprints. To make it easier for total beginners to get into Extbase, the team will try to build up the blog Example with new layout and proper documentation as a real source to get started developing with Extbase.
Some substantial effort will be targeted at documentation. Due to the fast paced change FLOW3 and Extbase undergo it is not always easy to determine what is working how in which version (Helmut Hummel made some very informative tables about that to be found <link http: typo3.org news article extbase-and-fluid-feature-overview and fluid feature>here). Stefan Frömken who has been working on his own “private” Extbase documentation will work with the Extbase Team to get the documentation issue up to speed. Also the “classic” book by Jochen Rau and Sebastian Kurfürst should get regular updates concerning its <link http: srv123.typo3.org git.typo3.org documentation typo3 book extbasefluid.git extbase-fluid-book _genesis trunk _build html free english translation>English online translation.
And last not not least: The topic of a dedicated Extbase Barcamp has been discussed! Despite of the meanwhile great number of TYPO3camps the Extbase Team thinks there is a need for further promotion and growth of the TYPO3 Extbase community as well as knowledge transfer within the community. We are wondering, what you all think of that, please leave comments, if you like to.And again, if you feel you want to contribute please do contact the Extbase Team (Felix Oertel, felix dot oertel at typo3 dot org).