[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 21th Skype meeting of the release 4.5 team

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Hi people,

this week we hold our 21st Skype meeting for the 4.5 release, this time
on Wednesday.

Only Benni was missing, the other guys were there: Olly Hader (core team
leader), Ben van't Ende (community manager), Steffen Kamper (4.5
technical leader) and Ernesto Baschny (4.5 release manager).

======================================================================
Project status
======================================================================

New extension manager
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Steffen continued working on it, fixing bugs, stabilizing the API. A
question was still open which was if the extension manager should
display so much developer related information (like missing XCLASSes
etc). He started a poll with the core developers to see what the general
feeling was.

Ernesto said that he things these things do not belong in the EM but to
extdeveval. Also the "CodeSniffer on Hudson":http://ci.typo3.org/ is a
good place to have these checks (already noted as "issue
10580":http://forge.typo3.org/issues/10580).

Steffen will finish the localization of the whole new EM soon. He has
cleaned up a lot the locallang file which was moved now to the
sysext/em/ (was in lang/ before). Ernesto noted that the translation
teams will have to translate all labels of the new EM anyway because of
that change. Steffen said that they are simplified now.

Gridview
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Not much news here, @Ernesto will try to contact Thomas to know about
the current progress and status.

Steffen mentioned that he still wants to implement the drag&drop
functionality in the Web>Page module, which was part of the Gridview
project from the T3UXW09.

FORM project
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Steffen spoke to Patrick Broens, who is now actively continuing work on
the FORM project to get it finally finished. This won't be included in
4.5, but will probably be a good candidate for 4.6.

Indexed search
----------------------------------------------------------------------

No news here, @Steffen will try to contact Dmitry again.

Styling / Skin team
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Much work is still pending in the "styling" front of our backend.
Ernesto noted that the new page tree looks like in a different font and
different spacing. Steffen said that the current style is almost the
original ExtJS style, so we would need some ExtJS tree styling in our
t3skin. An issue has to be created on the Skin teams issue tracker.
There are screens available already (from the T3UXW?).

Ben brought up the space above the modules menu. Steffen explained that
this was a design team decision, which wanted all text to start on the
same line. Ernesto noted that this isn't really the case, and it just
looks misaligned. We now will keep the second docheader line anyway. The
page tree sometimes shows some "second line" on the top (e.g. the
"filter" or the "new page" dropdown, or the "current workspace" name -
which is misaligned btw). So in general Ernesto feels that that
inconsistent space above the module menu isn't good anymore. We'll bring
that up in a future meeting with the design team.

Other than that the "skin team":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/skin is
doing great job under the leadership of Steffen Gebert, who is
organizing the tasks and keeping the team members busy.

CSH usability
----------------------------------------------------------------------

We also touched the topic of the context sensitive help and its
usability. This was already discussed with the design team in a meeting
a couple of weeks ago, but we've got no response yet (a suggestion). See
"issue 10347":http://forge.typo3.org/issues/10347 and reported "bug
16084":http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=16084.

We decided to make the modifications that make sense (reduce the delay,
remove the click-popup on the label but instead make the click select
the item - i.e. the checkbox, and re-add the link-icon for more
information inside the tooltip), while we wait for more input from the
design team.

Steffen also brought up the topic that there are still some old CSH
icons "?" in the backend which don't use the new CSH system at all (e.g.
in the docheader and on the page tree). @Someone will have to tackle that.

stdWrap everywhere
----------------------------------------------------------------------

There are still some not handled objects and some pending issues.
@Steffen will contact Joey about the status. Joey seems to be active
these weeks to work on it.

New TCA of pages and tt_content
----------------------------------------------------------------------

We discussed the problem that now all fields are in "palettes" in
tt_content and pages and no standalone fields anymore. Extensions which
used to add fields "before:" or "after:" certain field won't get this
position anymore, because the API doesn't consider palette fields.

So we need a new API and a backwards compatibility mode to be able to
add fields before fields that are in palettes. Ernesto proposes what
Joey already mentioned during the Code Sprint, in that the current API
(t3lib_extMgm::addToAllTCAtypes) should also find fields that are in
palettes and add the new field "before:" or "after:" the whole palette
instead. This will position the new field close to the desired location
and avoid trouble if the new field also comes with a palette.

Workspaces
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Workspaces team is working on the issues. One problem being tackled is a
performance issue: Currently all WS related data is being calculated on
every call, which can be very slow. Marko Bretsch plans to add some
caching to that to speed up the calls.

Another issue are the TABS which lists all workspaces. If the user is in
the Live workspace, and selects any Workspace-Tab which is not the
*current* workspace, the actions won't work, because TCEmain considers
the current WS-setting of the whole backend when saving. So either we
have to change the backend workspace on every tab change (meaning
reloading the whole backend or individually all frames / panels). An
easier solution would be simply to drop the "Action" column if the
currently selected workspace tab is not the current workspace (at least
while there is no better solution).

Also mentioned was the meeting the WS team had with Francois and the
release team on Monday to discuss the meaning of the checkbox "Enable
split-view". Overall we agreed that we don't need a checkbox. An user
which is in a workspace will always see the split view when doing a
frontend preview. Some caveats needs to be solved for that: 1) Currently
the split view is part of the WS-module and the user might not even have
access to that module. 2) a hook might be required on the FE rendering
process to redirect to split view in that situations.

TCA trees
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Seems to be pretty complete but there are some issues in the tracker.
@Steffen will contact Steffen Ritter to understand the current situation.

Linkvalidator
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Patrick will update the list of issues in "their
tracker":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-linkvalidator/issues,
which is linked in our bug tracker's main page. Christian Kuhn mentioned
some problems with the current implementation. @Olly will take a look at
it and report back.

Extbase / Fluid
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Patrick Broens seems to have some cases where backwards compatibility
was broken when upgrading to 4.5. @Olly will ask Pat about more
specifics and check with the Extbase team if changes are required. Olly
reminded that there are extensions calling non- at api parts of Extbase
classes, which are not meant to be called so this part is not required
to be backwards compatible (only the public @api).

@Olly will ask Bastian if we would like to join the v4 core team too,
because he seems very active in fixing v4 specific bugs in Extbase and
Fluid so it might make sense for him to be able to do it directly.

======================================================================
Other topics
======================================================================

Bug Trackers
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Olly and Steffen added a notice about where to report matters at
http://bugs.typo3.org/main_page.php. We found out that this "main page"
is not always shown to users (ben got a "blank page", Ernesto got only
news from 2006). @Someone from the server team should take a look at it.

We decided that core sub-projects should all use the issue tracker on
forge only (allowing better integration with SVN and facilitating future
transition to forge / git). This also means all current subprojects
using Mantis should migrate. Workspaces for example already migrated,
only some issues left on Forge. Ernesto mentioned that this hasn't been
discussed with Xavier yet (DBAL uses Mantis). We'll ask Xavier (or maybe
he reads it here ;) ) if he would be ok to continue with new issues
using forge only.

extdeveval
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Project already has all core team members as members and a working
"Issue
tracker":http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension-extdeveval/issues. As
planned some weeks ago. Missing is the mailing list. And we should have
more people looking in the issue tracker from time to time, so Steffen
proposed some Co-Leaders. @Olly will add Stucki and Ingmar (Core Team
Co-Leaders). Steffen just wanted to make sure someone took care of it
(caring about the issue tracker, releasing new versions from time to
time etc).

Donation popup
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Some people didn't feel confortable with the donation popup that was
added in 4.4. General consense was to remove the popup but instead
include the link to the donation in the "About" window. This was decided
after a long debate in the Marketing Team. There is already an idea from
Lars, but Lars will work on the design further. Steffen mentioned that
he likes the popup and even his wife spend some money after seeing it.

Login copyright screen
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ernesto brought up the topic of the "copyright footer" on the TYPO3
login screen (and also used on several other places, like the Install
Tool, the About screen and the TYPO3 production error handler). Ernesto
presented his idea of an optimize footer. We decided that it was ok. The
link to the license should be changed from http://typo3.com/1316.0.html
to http://typo3.org/license/, which ben created.

@Ernesto will make sure the patch enters the core.

@Steffen will collect links to typo3.com / typo3.com inside the core to
get an overview and put them all in constants to config_default.php so
that we have a central place of links to the typo3-domains.

BLE project
----------------------------------------------------------------------

There are no news about it, as far as Ben knows. @ben will ask Ingmar.

Intro Package in French
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The goal should be a multilingual package at first (instead of a "French
only" package).

@ben will contact the intro package team to get records translateable.
@ben will then contact french guys to then do the translations.

The IP team has to do some TypoScripting and some design / layout
decisions has to me made about the "language selection flags" in the
frontend.

Finally, the @release team has to make sure the IP package includes all
translations. Enabling foreign languages to be chosen in the backend of
a freshly installed intro package.

Next schedule
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Nothing scheduled but the next's week Monday 14h release team meeting.
Stay tuned!

Notice: *Only two weeks left for the release of beta3*


Cheers,
Ernesto