[TYPO3-community] Community Plugin - Current State

[Michael Knoll]

Hi Alexander,

let me give you some answers to the questions and "buts" in your mail. A 
friend and me wanted or want to build a community (as many people want 
to do these days I suppose) and as I did some pages with typo3 and 
started to write my own extensions recently, we had the plan to do this 
with Typo3.

After evaluating the extension currently available, we missed a lot of 
features and after taking a closer look on the code we came to the 
conclusion that they are not really useful for our purposes. After 
deciding to build our own extension, I found this mail-listing and 
posted some of our ideas and wanted to collect some more ideas. We put 
up a wiki page on which we tried to collect wish-lists and set up a roadmap.

One goal - which was not only our's but a common wish - was to use 
lib/div as a basis and no longer to use pi_base.

After some weeks of planning and talking about the whole thing, I wanted 
to start, as we would like to start our website about February next 
year. So the "many people work together" approach was - let's say 
corrupted by me simply starting to put up some of the functionality that 
was on everybody's wishlist.

The biggest problem at the moment seems to be the quick changes in 
lib/div, as it is still alpha and you can't be sure that the 
functionality you use at the moment is still available with the same 
interfaces some weeks later.

As soon as a little core of what we want to create is running, I will 
publicate it on TER or t3xdev so that everybody can help making a good 
piece of code out of it. At the moment I see no chance to coordinate 
more than the two of us (Lars and me) to do the programming stuff. If 
you have a better idea or can tell me how to coordinate a team managing 
the task, I'd be very thankful if you let me know how to do that.

The plugins we write at the moment are very small and quite 
community-low-level, so that I think we can reuse them, no matter how 
the whole-big-thing will look like one day.

Hope this explains a little of my problems and my thoughts.

Regards

Mimi



Alexander Heim wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> great to see, that there is a development in this process. Sadly i have
> had to muich work the last weeks to do something more and to think about
> it.
> 
> Now i have a big "but"! The idea of this Community-Community ;-) was or
> is in my eyes, to work togehter with a lot of people to get the best out
> of typo3 for developing community-websites. So I'm wondering, if i miss
> some discussions about the plan, how the stuff will be developed. Is
> there already a roadmap? Who is doing what? How is the guideline for
> developing? I understand, that just starting and writing code is more
> fun in the beginning, but without a clear concept, which is published,
> the complete idea of an open set of many small community extensions, who
> work easily and perfect together will die.
> 
> Maybe i missed some discussions somewhere. I thought, that we wanted to
> meet. But strange, this thread died. So whats up? Where? When?
> 
> I do not want to be negative, but i leaded and developed some big
> software projects and i just know all the problems which will come, if
> there is no clear concept before.
> 
> 
> But maybe someone can send me a document with the concept and i read it
> and say: perfect! everything is thoughtful and i'm happy :-)
> 
> 
> 
> Greetz
> Alex
> 
> 
> Michael Knoll schrieb:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> after I wrote my last test for this holidays last friday, Lars and I
>> started to write the first lines of code for the community extension. We
>> decided to use lib/div although it's really a hard piece of work to get
>> through the code and to find out how everything works. As Elmar
>> explained to me, it's still alpha.
>>
>> We try to set up a basic extension with most of the wishes you posted on
>>  the wiki.
>>
>> At the moment we are concentrating on the following functionality:
>>
>> - User registration (first step is done via fe_user_registration)
>> - User settings and privacy settings (extending fe_users and creating a
>> own table for complex privacy settings)
>> - User search
>> - Add/Remove Buddies
>> - Show relations between buddies
>> - A configurable user list to cope with any kind of user listing
>> (search-list, buddy-list, group-members-list, ...)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> After that, we will put up a messaging system, that enables users to
>> send messages on public boards as well as on private messaging.
>>
>> That will be the core of the extension. We are thinking about a kind of
>> a plugin concept to make the extension work with community-extensions to
>> get a modular concept, but that will be one of the later points.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> So far - regards
>>
>> Mimi