The month of May was quite dynamic. The Combined Steering Committee and Board meeting (CoSCoB) approved radical changes to the association by-laws enabling more community involvement. TYPO3 attended CMSexpo and LinuxTag. The new association website was launched with a sophisticated membership and shop module and the conference website for this year's European conference was launched based on TYPO3 Phoenix. Furthermore an increased activity in community communication is taking place.
TYPO3 Association
In the Combined Steering Committee and Board meeting (CoSCoB) in Dusseldorf, beginning of May, radical changes to the association by-laws were approved that will most likely take effect next year at the General Assembly. The Steering Committee will no longer exist and will be replaced by the Expert Advisory Board chosen from the members. More details can be found in the<link http: news.typo3.org news article the-typo3-association-opens-up-to-its-members>article Daniel Hinderink wrote about this topic.
Events
CMS Expo was held from May 3 – 5 in Chicago. Benni Mack, Marc Infield and Seth Conley represented TYPO3. CMS Expo is user-powered event that brings together content pros from multiple ecosystems. The conference was in its fourth year and is made up of a friendly group of about 400 people that skewed toward small businesses and municipalities with small projects.The conference has its roots in Joomla, so Joomla was well represented on both the speaker and attendees side. Many visitors to the booth noted they’d heard of TYPO3 and had come by to learn more. This represents a huge shift in perception from OSCON in 2009. Benni gave a couple of scheduled presentation on the first day, both were well attended. It is clear that awareness of TYPO3 is on the rise in the US. Marc's article gives a little more insight in what happened at CMS
Linuxtag was held from May 11 – 14 in Berlin for the 17th time. It was very special that we shared our booth this year with Drupal. Both usergroups from Berlin took care of the booth. On Friday we were invited by the Drupal Internaltionalization Team to join them for dinner. Excellent to see the Open Source spirit in full effect. The booth was not visited as well as the year beforer.
Core and RnD Team
The core team is preparing for a two day meeting in advance of the Developer Days in Switzerland. The RnD team met in May and talked about a variety of subjects. Some topics:
De-activate the extension coordination team (ECT) due to inactivity for many years. The RnD team will create and define guidelines and the future scope of the ECT
Issues with the current subversion, GIT/Gerrit system where discussed. Peter Niederlag was asked to provide support there.
Packaging/Releases
Work in progress to release source package ("base"), dummy package ("blank"), introduction package ("introduction") and SaaS Plesk Package (apsstandard.org)
SaaS Plesk Package (apsstandard.org) is not ready yet. Will be next task to be worked on.
Google Summer of Code 2011
6 slots (50% v4, 50% v5)
<link http: typo3.org development gsoc2011 students _blank>typo3.org/development/gsoc2011/students/
We will use the GSOC mailing list to communicate about the events, ideas, thoughts - for both sides, students and mentors.
Developer Days 2011. Tasks: Invite Core Team members, set up agenda for Core Team Meeting
Translation toolkit team
At this moment translations for core and extensions are done in a rather rudimentary way with basic authorisation. Dominique Feyer had already started checking out Pootle as a translation toolkit and is now putting his knowledge to work for the TYPO3 core, extensions and documentation together with his colleague Laurent. Pootle is used by a large amount of Open Source projects like Mozilla, LibreOffice, Tweetdeck and will also be used by TYPO3 Phoenix/5.0. It provides a number of very helpful features that make translating a easier then it ever was. A small team was started that takes care of the implementation of Pootle and will take care of the implementation of the XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) format into the core so TYPO3 can use Pootle. The current homegrown LLXML format is not supported by Pootle.
<link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v4-xliff _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-xliff
Phoenix / FLOW3 Team
After the big effort to get the T3CON11 website online, work continued with more complex parts such as the different plugins necessary for the next phase. The Call for Papers could finally be launched in time on May 18th and TYPO3 5.0 could demonstrate several more of its features, such as the security framework providing Single-Sign-on with the typo3.org user database and the extended routing capabilities for plugins. During the remaining time until the conference, the core team will continue launching new functionality for the T3CON11 website.
Further efforts have gone into cleanup of the internal structure of the TYPO3 Phoenix JavaScript files. Additionally, the team worked on making the user interface testable, in order to make the UI more stable. These tests are also the basis for the upcoming refactoring to ExtJS 4.
Extbase and Fluid
Recently some concerns were raised in the TYPO3 developer mailing list which questioned the stability and implementation of Extbase and Fluid. As Extbase is a backport of certain parts of FLOW3, the core team takes these concerns seriously and spent a good amount of time to improve the workflows, documentation and communication in order to avoid misunderstandings in the future – this process is still ongoing. Furthermore, the team started to hold weekly open discussions, like is not uncommon these days for active teams, and aims to extract as much feedback as possible. Additionally, there will be a workshop on the TYPO3 Developer Days to improve the collaboration around Extbase.The protocols, agenda and other relevant information can be found on Forge.
<link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v4-mvc wiki _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-mvc/wiki
TYPO3 version 4.6 – Release Team
The release team had three meetings in the month of May.
The packaging scripts for the release have been updated to work with Git instead of Subversion and the release of TYPO3 4.6.0 alpha1 will serve as the first real-life test for them. Regarding the introduction package, we came up with the conclusion that maintaining it for multiple branches of TYPO3 will be time-consuming for no real benefit.
The ExtJS conference was a success and Steffen took the opportunity to make some demos of TYPO3 and show the attendees how we integrated the JavaScript framework within the TYPO3 Backend.
The team brainstormed on apparent lack of activity in TYPO3 development. Of course development is going on and a few people are still quite active on providing patches and reviewing RFC's (many thanks) but anyway, we are forced to admit that there is objectively less activity going on "publicly". Some of this is suspected to be related to the move to Git and Gerrit. Although this reviewing system is very efficient and basically allow anybody to easily give +1 by reading and/or testing (now mapped to "Code Review" and "Verified" respectively), the sometimes informal way of reviewing patches and discuss changes we used to have in the Core mailing list is absent. We are aware that starting to use those new tools is not as easy as it should be and we will try to echo to the proposal to create some video tutorials.
Patrick, leader of the Form project has finished basic work. It should be ready by now and will hopefully be integrated soon into Core.
Project XLIFF aims at replacing the way we deal with localization within TYPO3 by a better, state-of-the-art, approach. This project was kickstarted by Dominique but he now needs some help to push it forward. We would like to integrate his work as soon as possible and plan to backport this feature to 4.5 LTS if it proves to be stable and well-integrated.
Benni did some further refactoring of the Install Tool using Fluid. He is refactoring "bottom to top", recoding every page and separating them. T3DD11 will be the opportunity to finalize most of this refactoring.
Steffen is planning to do some prototyping of the Backend to enhance the loading mask after moving. We currently have about 56 JS files loaded and this is something to consider too to speed up the Backend, although many of them are related to prototype and script.aculo.us.
The above is just a selection of what the team talked about in the month of May. The team stores protocols of every meeting on their Forge project. The <link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v46-projects wiki releaseteammeeting_agenda _blank>agendafor the meetings is also open and you are invited to add an item. The team plans to open up their meetings as well in the future.
<link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v46-projects _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki
Teams
A growing number of teams have weekly meetings and store their agenda and protocol on TYPO3 Forge. Among these team are Workspaces, Release, Design, Extbase, Semantics, FLOW3 (scrum meetings). This ensures a certain consistency in development for these projects and them not slipping into a state of nothingness like we see all to often in other teams. This solid base kays the foundation of further improvements in community communication and structure.
TYPO3Camps
In the weekend fro the 20th to 22nd of May, the TYPO3camp Stuttgart (<link http: www.typo3camp-stuttgart.de _blank>www.typo3camp-stuttgart.de) attracted 200 TYPO3 enthusiasts to the beautiful location of Schloß Hohenheim (Hohenheim Palace), in mids of a fantastic park in Stuttgart. More on this BarCamp and coming BarCamps in Germany and beyond soon.
TYPO3 association website relaunch
The relaunch of the TYPO3 association website has been awaited for along time. Especially the new membership module was high on the agenda. Renewing membership has never been easier and the TYPO3 association hopes to gain and keep members with this improvement. There are still some glitches the technical team hopes to deal with asap.