[TYPO3-dev] Workspace improvements, new already financed project - Feedback desired

[Sonja Scholz]

Hi all,

in January we will develop several improvements to the workspace modul 
of TYPO3. Some changes will be financed, so we will do that anyway. To 
make sure that we can put our improvements into the core, we would like 
to make a strategy with the responsible core developers. There will be a 
lot of changes, so it won´t be a single easy to check patch.

Our target is to get the following things into the core of TYPO3 4.3.

- Bug Report: 9682:
--------------------
A few weeks ago, I posted a RFC entry in the core list for the following 
bug report: http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=9682

Description:
It should be possible to configure the workspace, so not the DB mount 
from the sys_workspace configuration is used. Instead of this, the DB 
mount of user/group should be used.

This makes it possible to have several backend users and groups with 
different DB mounts, which uses the same workspace. This prevents a lot 
of workspace configurations for a complex permission structure.

There is a clean patch against the trunk with the bug report.

- Rewrite of staging and mailing process
------------------------------------------
The target is, to have the stages (Publish, Editing, Review) of a 
workspace modular. So it's possible to create own stages, where Mail 
recipients, following stages and editors can be defined.

We will implement a IRRE interface for the Workspace, where you can 
create and connect the stages.

- Improve the labels/translations in workspace
----------------------------------------------
We also want to improve the labels and descriptions in the workspace 
application, to make it easier to understand for the customer.

- Easy preview method for Extensions
---------------------------------------
At the moment nearly no extension in the frontend supports preview of ws 
records. This is because it is nearly impossible to care about workspace 
versions when you search and list records with joins. We found a nice 
solution with subselects or views, which makes it very easy. This part 
has not main priority.

We will develop most of the things in January and February.

May be the best would be to create a 4.3 project on forge.typo3.org and 
merge it at some point with the main version trunk. Like the other big 
4.3 improvements do it.

We know that this will take some time until it is in a release, may be 
it goes into 4.4. For our needs we will use xclasses to integrate it in 
the projects, so we are not depending on the core integration.

It would be really great to make all this available for the community, 
but for this we need some support to prepare our changes for the core in 
the right way.

Kind regards,

Sonja