[TYPO3-v4] Highlight extbase extensions

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi,

> We have several devs, who like Extbase, say it is very easy to develop with
> it and it is cool. That's it. This is all what they say.

To be honest as I came back to Extbase after having letting my activity 
on it sleep for a while, I don't think I'm currently quicker with 
Extbase than with pi_base. I'd say it's more or less the same. At the 
end the code is naturally cleaner with Extbase and Fluid is just perfect 
even if it still lacks many useful ViewHelpers and that e.g., the 
condition VH is far from being really usable in trickier cases.

I win lot's of time with edit/update form (and errors) handling, with 
transparent access to the database and the rest. BUT I recently lost 
lots of time figuring out whether I did something wrong or whether 
Extbase had bugs. And the later was the case.

Hopefully I have the typofaktum cheat sheets (Extbase/Fluid) but 
documentation is really missing, I definitively agree.

But I still consider Extbase being really great and something I 
personally bet on.

> Now imagine other devs. They use pibase or lib/div or their own solution.
> They have a choice: invest time to learning Extbase using very poor
> documentation or continue their own development way. On one hand "Extbase
> is the future", "easy to develop" and "cool". On the other hand: "easy" is
> relative for everybody, "cool" is subjective and "future" has a tendency to
> change. So it is 50:50 for and against learning Extbase. If you are a
> freelancer, you can risk investing time and either win or loose, right? If
> you are a company, you can loose more with unclear perspectives of winning.

It's up to you. I made the bet, even if currently still a bit risky (you 
have to be prepared to run patched version of the extension on a 
productive system). But still, I'm happy will all the feature it gives 
me and I'm sure infancy problems will be tackled with soon. Extbase 
really starts being usable, honestly!

> What Extbase really needs for wider adoption is a good advertisement
> campaign. We have lots of devs who are know to create wonderful and widely
> used extensions. Take Georg, for example. He is very enthusiastic about
> Extbase recently but... That's it.
>
> Now imagine if Georg (or some other dev) created a rgsmoothgallery-like
> extension with Extbase and wrote an article about it on typo3.org showing
> how to do it starting from the kickstarter. That would be very interesting.
> People need much less time to read that than to try themselves. They will
> read and see if it is easy and if workflow suits them. 3-5 articles of such
> kind should be enough to convince *and teach* lots of people how to program
> with Extbase. That way Extbase can become far more popular among developers.

I could think of writing such an article, it's a good idea! Will see if 
I find time to do it.

Xavier