TYPO3 Coding Weekend in Karlsruhe

From December 13th-14th 2008 the core and core-related developers Ingmar Schlecht, Sebastian Kurfürst, Oliver Hader, Andreas Wolf and Jochen Rau arranged a TYPO3 Coding Weekend in Karlsruhe/Germany. The session took place in the office of punkt.de - thanks a lot for also being a reliable hoster in social affairs! The main topics were "refactoring t3lib_TCEforms" and "MVC skeleton/architecture in TYPO3 v4". Both will likely be part of TYPO3 4.3.

The focus of the first day was on refactoring t3lib_TCEforms. Andreas Wolf, student in electrotechnology from Karlsruhe, began to untie the code-monster TCEforms and transfer the functionality to a modernized and encapsulated architecture. Andreas started to work on it after the Developer Days 2008 and presented his current results to be reviewed and discussed. In future, each element - starting from a simple input field over multiple selector boxes to Inline Relational Record Editing - will be represented with its own object and scope. This allows developers to utilize and extend elements used to interact with back-end editors very easily.

The second day was all about introducing model-view-controller (MVC) behaviours into TYPO3 v4. Most of the ideas behind MVC are taken from FLOW3 and adapted to work in TYPO3 v4 in respect of the system architecture and v4-specific premises like the front-end cache. This is a very important step to move TYPO3 v4 towards TYPO3 v5 as well as to enable and motivate extension developers to utilize these new perspectives and opportunities. Jochen Rau, self-employed TYPO3 developer from Tübingen/Germany, is going to drive this project further in aspects of software engineering for TYPO3 4.3. Jochen became famous with his "gimmefive" bridge that allows one to implement extensions in TYPO3 v4 based on FLOW3.

The meeting was not really about coding in the sense of writing source code but more in terms of planning, analysing and creating the architectural basement for both projects. Fitting well with the open source idea and our vision "inspiring people to share", the whole session was published as live video stream on UStream and was followed by approx. 20 guests at a time.

Since work does not magically get done by itself and one single person can't afford all the time, we're looking for developers. So, if you're familiar with t3lib_TCEforms and/or MVC, have the time to take over a well defined task and are willing to do so bindingly, please <link>get in contact with me - I will distribute it accordingly then.

Personally I think that this was a very fecund and productive weekend and we've had a nice time together. Due to the face-to-face situation we had the possibility to act in concert efficiently which resulted in detailed plans for two more major features in TYPO3 4.3. So, thanks to everybody for participating physically or virtually!

Rock on!
Olly