[TYPO3-dev] RFC: Change roadmap for 4.5 and 5.0

[Michael Scharkow]

Dear *,

as the latest and greatest version of TYPO3 is out and 'almost feature 
complete' to cite Kasper himself, I would like to spend a second or two 
on the roadmap for the next major milestones.

In short, I'd argue that we should drop the 4.5 milestone and move 
straight to 5.0 while still improving the UI and usability of TYPO3 on 
the way. There are some reasons for this:

1. If we change the TYPO3 core for UI enhancements (and most of that is 
hardcoded in the code), we risk losing a lot of that work again when 5.0 
is out and everything will be refactored, and most stuff even rewritten.

2. Usability enhancements are very hard to implement if you're *always* 
faced with the holy cow of backwards compatibility. How are we supposed 
to make TYPO3 easier to use and still make everything look as if you're 
still in 3.5? The backwards-compat forces us to write tons of glue code, 
wrappers on wrappers, update-wizards and makes the code maintainance 
overly hard.

3. UI consistency means that you have to be *opinionated* about best 
practices, and not encouraging 20 different ways of doing stuff. TYPO3 
has until now been very unopinionated because of backwards-compat: We 
still ship crappy invalid static templates *although* we know better, we 
still support HTML4 doctypes although there is absolutely no reason not 
to support XHTML only (except the said legacy arguments), which leads to 
incredible amounts of code (and developer efforts, and support mails) 
being wasted.

4. Being tied to PHP4 sucks, and makes real elegant solutions hard to 
implement. It also leads to an inflation of
if (function_exists(foo)){
	foo()
} else {
	fake_self_implemented_foo()
}

TYPO3 does its own SQL escaping, output compression, etc. only because 
we have to make sure that it runs on Grandma's VAXstation with PHP3. If 
core devs were allowed to rely on PHP5 features, we could produce more 
elegant and maintainable solutions.
Given that TYPO3 is already a memory hog and therefore does not run in 
tiny shared hosting environments anyway, why not make it PHP5 for the 
next version?

So again: Continue the 4.x line with bug fixes only, and start TYPO3 5.0 
now, with some snapshots on the way, like the ZOPE people did with X3.

Cheers,
Michael