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

[Thomas Hempel]

Hi Michael,

> 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.
I agree with you. Nothing is worst than doing things twice because of having 
something ready ASAP. Let's do it right in ONE step.

> 
> 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.
I don't think that this backwards compatibility is very good from now on. I 
think for 4.0 it was important because no great core changes where implemented. 
I mean in a refactoring way! The new features are great! ;-)
Let's take outself a year and refactor the core to have a more reliable base for 
the future. Maybe oine can think a about a transistion script which converts all 
needed changes from a 3.X or 4.X version to 5.0. This has to be done only ONE 
time. After this step, the structure should be good enough to give up the 
compatibility to version before 5.0. (Only the API things, not TypoScript of course)

> 
> 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.
Think the same. XHTML is the future! +1

> 
> 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.
Once again. +1 from me. In one year TYPO3 should run on PHP5 only. But it was 
already on the schedule AFAIK. But please give up the compatiblity to PHP 
version from the last century. ;-)

> 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.
+1
Don't fear the future. Make TYPO3 ready for the future!


Greets,
Thomas


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