TYPO3 Core Developer Meeting in Hamburg

Categories: Development Created by Søren Schaffstein
From monday to wednesday the TYPO3 Core developers met for their regular strategy meeting. A lot of activity could be denoted since their last gathering in October and so the main topics were the results of last month's development and the next steps in the main projects TYPO3 4.3, 5.0 and FLOW3.
The decisions which were made during the TYPO3 Transition Days in October 2008 show first impact on the version 4 branch by now. Important features like the MVC, caching framework and the new template engine Fluid have been backported and will already be part of the upcoming 4.3 release. Extbase, the new foundation for plugins, will allow for development of extensions for version 4 already using the concepts and the API of version 5. Those extensions can later be converted to version 5 packages in nearly no time. An important signal set by the core team is the increased importance of user interface and user experience design. Therefore Jens Hoffmann, leader of the HCI team, has been invited to become a member of the core team. Jens proposed to introduce a TYPO3 User eXperience Week which will very likely take place from November 14th to 21st 2009. The idea behind this event is to further improve usability and realise usability improvements on site.
Jochen Rau, the key person behind Extbase, was also welcomed as a new core team member. Another decision was the election of Benjamin Mack as the release manager of version 4.4 After an intensive period of implementing new features, version 4.4 will address the "remaining 20%" which need to be completed for a smooth user experience. Consequently this version mainly focusses on clean integration of the new foundations like Extbase in all parts of the core, bugfixes and usability improvements. Finally further preparation of the migration to version 5 will be done. FLOW3, the application framework acting as the foundation of TYPO3 5.0 will see its first alpha release on June, 1st. After this initial release subsequent versions will follow in a monthly rhythm. Details of the core team meeting can be found in the official wiki: wiki.typo3.org/T3DD09/CoreTeamMeeting/Protocol