The third quarter started, in July, with the Developer Days in Sursee, Switzerland. The most significant occurrence for this quarter was the release of the new translation server, which will enable a lot of people to contribute to the community.
Developer Days
With almost 220 attendees the event once again grew bigger than the year before. In 6 parallel tracks it featured 46 workshops and talks. The topics reached from very low level technical talks to relaxing massage workshops.
The Developer Days themselves were well organised as usual. This time the keynote was done by Robert Lemke and Ben van 't Ende and was very community oriented. The guys distributed balls made from elastic bands as a symbol for the community and talked about how you can get involved in the community.
Talks and workshops were quite distributed over the premises, but the location of the conference rooms and the conference rooms themselves were absolutely great.
The Developer Days featured two quite remarkable happenings we did not have previously. The Photo Booth and the Badge Swap.
The Photo Booth was originally planned to take pictures of the attendees with signs that contain texts like "I need a dependency injection". It also proved an excellent opportunity to take pictures of the teams, put them in the spotlight and show the community and the world who these people are. The team pictures where done in an incredible professional way and are all available on Flickr. It really shows members of the TYPO3 community come in all sizes and shapes.
<link http: www.flickr.com photos typo3 _blank>www.flickr.com/photos/typo3/
The Badge Swap was initiated to get the new attendees into the community spirit. Swapping badges has it's roots in earlier Developer Days where some people were very eager to switch identities, which can be understandable in some cases. Some badges were very desired and people even got offered good money to swap their current badge in a joking way. The initiative was excellent and got a lot of people interested in who actually this person was of which they had the badge. On Saturday there was the badge swapping market where everyone tried to repossess their badge. It really was a lively marketplace with people shouting out for their badge or shouting out the name on their current badge to find the corresponding person.
Core Team Meeting
The core team had it's meeting prior to the developer days. Quite some people from other teams like the workspaces team and some other people from outside the core team visited this year's core team meeting. A lot of very interesting topics were discussed and a tremendous work was done on reviews and finalizing new features. The few people not yet accustomed to Git and Gerrit had the opportunity to participate to ad-hoc workshops helping them to set up their development environment. The core team split themselves in working-groups to talk about specific subjects.
Translation server and XLIFF
Dominique Feyer and Laurent Cherpit have been working relentlessly to get the new translation server up and running. The new translation server is available on<link http: translation.typo3.org _blank>translation.typo3.org<link http: translation.typo3.org.the _blank>. The server is based on Pootle and used by many more software projects like Tweetdeck, LibreOffice and Mozilla. It provides and excellent work-flow where anyone can suggest translations and translations are approved centrally by admins. The whole system also provides an excellent overview of the translation status. Pootle uses the XLIFF format and for that matter the default LLXML had to be changed/adapted in the core of TYPO3.
If you are interested in being part of a translation team, please send an email to the official translation mailing list (typo3.translation.general) with your <link http: typo3.org _blank>typo3.orgusername and your preferred language team.
Google Summer of Code
It was 'pencils down' for the GSoC projects in the month of August. Here is a little summary of the work that has been done.
Andreas Wolf, mentored by Jochen Rau, has been working on “Integration of semantic ontologies”. This project was originally focused on creating an import for Semantic Ontologies, to enable site creators to enrich their site with well-defined and structured content types created by domain experts. Unfortunately, this proved to be really complex, which led to the decision to focus on an export of the TYPO3 data structures and content to semantic-web-compatible formats. This now allows to connect TYPO3 and the Semantic Web by providing data in standardized formats. The experience and code gained from this project is also a basis for further steps towards a fully semantic TYPO3. Planned are the aforementioned ontology import, a mapping between existing content types - based on semantic descriptions - and a new content storage for TYPO3 based on triples. Work on these projects will be continued in the TYPO3 Semantics Team.
The “User Administration Tool” rewrite approach by Aimable Tuyishime, mentored by Benni Mack, helped the student a lot to dig into the TYPO3 core and its use of the list and editing functionality. Aim built a tool that helps to list and edit back end users and groups and front end users and groups and will probably be available as a separate extension for the TYPO3 back end.
Nicolas and his mentor, Christian Müller, defined the necessary steps and technical details on the “TYPO3 transition” tool that would convert a TYPO3 v4 page tree into a TYPO3 Phoenix site package to get you started. They decided to work with XSLT translations as v4 offers an XML export format and Phoenix an XML import. After meeting at the Developer Days in Sursee the goals were redefined, as the progress in the TYPO3 Phoenix content model was not as was anticipated, so the team couldn't define conversions for most of the v4 content types. The idea works good and it is now possible to convert pages and text contents with an extensible XLST + PHP conversion. Nicolas is dedicated to go on with his work and is currently wrapping all this up into a nice v4 extension package that will export your page and present you with a TYPO3 Phoenix site package ready to import.
Pascal Jungblut, mentored by Tobias Liebig, spent this summer to work on “FLOW3: data model browsing”. It allows you to browse the data of any FLOW3 package just like a database browser, such as phpMyAdmin or Sequel Pro. The advantage is that the browser itself is written in FLOW3, so it has knowledge of all the data types and relations between objects. When Pascal started, he already had experience with TYPO3 and Extbase, but never did anything with FLOW3 nor git and our review system Gerrit before. He really quickly get into it and gets in touch with the whole FLOW3/Phoenix team. He greatly solved all challenges successfully during the summer. A demo and some more informations can be found on Pascal's project page:<link http: browser.srv.pascalj.de _blank>browser.srv.pascalj.de
During the last weeks Ryan Graham, mentored by Oliver Hader, analyzed the current behaviour of the available solutions for “Static File Caching” and e.g. had a look into nc_staticfilecache, Varnish Caches, the general cache flow of the TYPO3 Core and also into ExtJS. The results are now in a new system extension "staticfilecache" (typo3/sysext/staticfilecache/) which implements several components of the caching framework and also creates a new backend module based on ExtJS that shall help backend administrators to manage (refresh or clear) existing cached elements.
<link http: typo3.org development gsoc2011 _blank>typo3.org/development/gsoc2011/
<link http: www.google-melange.com gsoc org google gsoc2011 typo3 _blank>www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2011/typo3
TYPO3 version 4.6 – Release Team
The alpha and beta releases have been churned out by Xavier Persequers exactly as planned, during these three months, all geared towards the release of TYPO3 version 4.6 in October.
<link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v46-projects _blank>forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki
TYPO3 branding
Rasmus Skjoldan is working on a brand book for TYPO3. It is a book about how we think and talk. As the Brand book will contain general guidelines about image choices, there will also be a a more specific concept embracing especially events and marketing. That will be the TYPO3 Story book of the year, starting with 2012. This would function as the brief of the year - for everything being designed through one year. To outsiders this will mean that whatever type of interaction you have with TYPO3, it will always be connected with the same kind of visual symbols - and at the same time prevent the Brand book from giving too narrow guidelines.
typo3.org website relaunch
From the 14th until the 19th of September another relaunch code sprint was held in Wiesbaden. We had a very balanced and experienced group of people working together. In spite of the huge amount of work that has been done the new website is not finished yet. The current relaunch percentage is stuck at 95%. The remaining 5% are some major blockers among which the Extension Repository and login that prevent the relaunch. Everyone is fully aware the relaunch is very important and we are doing all we can and have time for to get the relaunch done. The current state can be viewed on <link http: preview.typo3.org _blank>preview.typo3.org.
TYPO3camps
An excellent example of community activity are the TYPO3 camps. The last german one, in a row of four, took place in Munich from September 9 -11. On average some 200 people visit these free of charge events based on the Bar Camp principle. The TYPO3camp the concept has become an established and recognized brand, and although there are already four regular ones, there’s still room for more. Next year there will probably be two more TYPO3camps added to the existing ones in Hamburg, Munich, Berlin and Stuttgart.