TYPO3 v5 project report: August 2008

Categories: Development Created by Robert Lemke
With some delay, here's the 5.0 activity report of August 2008.
Although I enjoyed two weeks of holidays (during which my wife and me moved again - this time within Lübeck - and renovated our new home) and Karsten took a few days off with his family in his second home in Latvia, this August turned out to be surprisingly productive and equally motivating. The month started with a nice meeting which had the objective to discuss the transition from TYPO3 v4 to version 5. Ingmar Schlecht visited us in his former hometown Lübeck and Michael Stucki joined the meeting via Skype. As an outcome of this session we initiated the TYPO3 Transition Days, a core team meeting which allows us to discuss the transition and migration strategies with all interested core developers.

Can it reconstitute and update?

Karsten continued working on the persistence framework and the related parts in the Content Repository. An important breakthrough was the the object-reconstitution-from-nodes feature - or, more simple: We can now retrieve again what we saved into the CR ;-) After reaching this milestone it is now possible (and a lot of fun) to create objects, transparently persist them into the CR, retrieve them again through FLOW3's query processing mechanism and automatically save an updated version of them. As you can imagine, this is quite an important step in terms of the overall progress towards TYPO3 5.0 and therefore a big relief for us to see that our concept works in a real implementation.

Lucene

For the search and indexing functionality of the Content Repository Karsten decided to use Zend Lucene which he bundled into a FLOW3 package and is now distributed with the TYPO3CR.

New core team member

Last month we also had the pleasure to welcome another active developer in the 5.0 core team: Matthias Hörmann from Saltation is spending a big part of his working time with supportive development for the TYPO3CR - first results of his work are already committed to our Subversion repository.

REST and the backend

For my part I put my focus on the development of the native REST service support of the FLOW3 framework and a first prototype of the TYPO3 backend. The intention at this time is not to work out a cool design and user interface but rather experiment with the communication between the (currently extJS-driven) backend and the REST services. These services allow not only the backend to retrieve and alter information about pages, content, users etc. but will also allow for connecting TYPO3 with other applications and creating cool meshups ... Before I disappeared in my renovation holidays, I was happy to see that our prototype backend could display a real page tree which was truly loaded from the Content Repository through a FLOW3 REST service ...

Link generation

Also working on the MVC front, Bastian worked on the link generation features of the FLOW3 router. Although still in an early stage, his implementation already allows you to easily render links to other actions, controllers and packages.

Moreover ...

Other details worth mentioning: We bumped the requirements to PHP 5.3 which provide a few important features we already need in FLOW3. The MVC controllers now support forwards and redirects and allow for sending custom HTTP headers and status codes. The Web Request Builder and Router now know the concept of representation formats and choose the correct view (HTML / JSON / text etc.) automatically.

And what happens in September?

With the OpenExpo, T3CON and PHP Conference at the horizon we now start our final spurt to get some of the features finished and ready for a smooth presentation. Some topics we'll hit this month are (still) persistence, the REST services, localization / translation, the link helper, the CMS domain model and of course further experiments with the future backend. It's not clear yet when we'll really have a first official release of FLOW3, but in terms of features and stability we now reach a point which lets us realistically think about first pilot projects based on FLOW3.