[TYPO3-commerce] commerce development - next steps

[Rik Willems]

Dear Christian and all others involved in commerce,

I have been absent from the mailing list and commerce development for 
some time but am still an active user of the extension. I'm glad to see 
the recent spurt in activity on the mailing list and good initiatives to 
improve commerce. I'm more than willing to help!

I'd like to outline a few of my thoughts concerning all recent 
suggestions and initiatives.

Refactoring is a very important part of improving commerce. Some of the 
code is just too complex or spread to be well maintained. This is true 
for all plugins. I know where to look for something but it's not easy!

There are a lot of issues in Forge that are either very old, not well 
described or just ignored. In my thought it would be good to clean up 
Forge to get a good view on what are true problems with commerce 
currently. These problems can be tackled so we end up with a short issue 
list what makes it much easier to maintain the extension.

To be honest I'm unsure wether I'm in favour of the switch to Fluid. 
Probably it will be a lot of work. This work pays with the introduction 
of a flexible templating system. On the other hand it doesn't fix any 
real problems in commerce. I'd much prefer to freeze the features of 
commerce and put all the effort into fixing the major current problems. 
Implementing Fluid in Commerce at this point to me feels like putting 
new rims on an already great car that still has some engine problems to 
sort out.

I saw various comments on breaking changes. I'm very much in favour not 
to implement these. Running a commerce implementation requires much 
attention to details already. If you are not able to update a commerce 
implemtation because of breaking changes I think many users will be very 
much annoyed. Breaking changes is not in line with TYPO3 development in 
general, too.

Perhaps it would be good to dive into all the Commerce backend scripts 
as well. But a recent look into that found that is even more complex 
stuff than the frondend. Perhaps that is for later but good to keep in mind.

I'm looking forward to all of your thoughts on all of this.

Thanks!

Cheers, Rik





Op 24-5-2011 20:24, Christian Kuhn schreef:
> Hey there,
>
> to keep you informed on what has been discussed by Volker, Ingo and me
> recently, regarding the current flow of activity in commerce:
>
> - e-netconsulting has an interest in finishing and committing the 'new
> payment' patch (issue #4980). This should be done without major breaking
> changes in current code base. Thus, we decided to push this patch and
> will hopefully finish it soon. As soon as this patch made it to trunk,
> we will release 0.13.0, a version that can be upgraded to from prior
> versions without major headaches. If we already broke things recently,
> we will consider this as bugs of 0.13 (like issue #26957).
>
> - After 0.13, we are able to release minor bugfixes for this version and
> will open trunk for major refactorings like fluid _inclusive_ breaking
> changes. We want to develop trunk as far as needed to come up with a new
> base for piX classes and parts of the db API, then.
>
> We hope this path is ok for you.
>
> Regards
> Christian
>