[TYPO3-community] Community Plugin - Current State

[Volker Graubaum]

Hi,

> I've until now been a silent group watcher. 

Me to ;-)

> I really like your idea of having a set of community feature extensions!
Me to ;-)

> typo3.org will soon be getting a lot more community features, which is 
> just another reason taht makes me interested in your efforts and to team 
> up with you!

Me to ;-)

> To make maintainance easy and smooth I suggest you split things up into 
> multiple extension like the following:
> 
> community or community_core (collecting all base functions for the other 
> extensions)
> community_feuserregister
> community_messages
> community_buddies
> 
> community_whatever ...

Nice Idea, so is there already a wiki page for collecting ideas?
Otherwise we should start one

> History has shown that it really gets hard to maintain a big extension. 
> I for myself can tell that from TIMTAB, a recent example is commerce and 
> a rather good example would be DAM (the way features are split into 
> separate extesions, not the development process ;-)

You're write, so a bigger team would be great, and someone who makes 
projectManagement for that, to be sure, that developing goes in the 
right way.

> Also to make it easy to remember what which plugin does: In commerce and 
> TIMTAB we did the mistake to put a lot of plugins and mods in one 
> extension without naming them. The result is pi1...pi6, mod1 .... modX - 
> now which one does what? In fact xou can choose whatever name you want, 
> go for it! A good thing which an upcoming version of the kickstarter 
> will do also is using prefixes: piMessages, modUserAdmin ... so you can 
> still distinguish between plugins and modules.

That's right, but here I don't see a big problem, but it would be nicer ;-)

BUT about the number of plugins in

In fact, I even like bringing things together, which belongs together 
seems to be useful (example DAM, which was splitted in different extensions.

> It also showed with TIMTAB and DAM already that it's good to have all 
> extensions start with the same prefix (timtab_, dam_, commerce_). This 
> makes it easily obvious that the extensions belong together. Also please 
>  refrain from putting personal initials in front of extensions keys:
> http://news.typo3.org/news/article/about-extension-maintainance/news/
> 

What's about Elmars idea extension__somehting.
Will this be realy be the future and is it coordinate with the core team?

>> At the moment we are concentrating on the following functionality:
>>
>> - User registration (first step is done via fe_user_registration)
> 
> One note: I couldn't find that extKey in TER, in case you meant 
> sr_feuser_register, please do not use it because of Franz' update policy.

Right but it has some good concepts from the past. We are adding Ajax 
functionallity in the moment and hat to increase only a few methods and 
calls. Maybe it's time to create a new extension, add the good things 
from sr_feuser_register to it and bring it to the future ;-)

>> - User settings and privacy settings (extending fe_users and creating 
>> a own table for complex privacy settings)
>> - User search

> please also reuse functions from "standard" extensions, newloginbox has 
> a search AFAIR.

Nicer would be a generall search over all tables.
I like the way XING has improved the search

>> - A configurable user list to cope with any kind of user listing 
>> (search-list, buddy-list, group-members-list, ...)
> 
> For newloginbox I  at least know that it has a listing plugin. This 
> leads to the next advise: If there's already a "standard" extension, use 
> it and contribute to it! In case of listing users I also could think of 
> pulling the function out of newloginbox and moving it to 
> community_userlisting... f.e. (Robert would talk of "separation of 
> concerns" in TYPO3 5.0 speak ;-)

Yes, what's about cwt_community ?

>> The next step will be to put up groups. We decided to extend 
>> fe_user_groups for that purpose and will put up some functionality 
>> that enables users to join groups or to invite other users into groups 
>> etc.
> 
> great idea, we'll for sure use that for typo3.org!

+1

>> We also decided to put up the basic functionality with new extensions 
>> based on lib/div as most of the old extensions are based on pibase. As 
>> soon as there is a example-installation of it, we will send a link to 
>> the list.
> 
> All cool!

:-)

> One last thing: With TIMTAB I tried to unite the configuration of the 
> plugins in a single namspace. That means that the core community 
> extension would introduce a TS configuratin space 
> "plugins.tx_community". The messaging options would go into 
> plugins.tx_community.messages, user settings into 
> plugins.tx_community.users and so on - even if users and messages are in 
> different extensions then the core. This makes configuration more easy 
> and logical.

nice idea... :-)

> P.S. I think I should put all this stuff in a new version of that 
> extension maintainance article - what do you think, are those hints 
> usefull, do they sound good?

+1

Greetings Volker