[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 1st meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

[Oliver Hader]

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

here are the notes of the 1st meeting of the 4.6 Release Team. Since
Ernesto did a great job in transparent communication with these "famous
minutes" during the 4.5 development, we of course aim to keep this for
the future.

The minutes are also available in the wiki of TYPO3 4.6:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-03-14_-_Minutes_from_the_1st_meeting

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Minutes from the 1st meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

*March 14th, 2011*

The 4.6 release team meets weekly for a Skype discussion round on the
current activities. If you find this report interesting or have some
comment or question about a particular topic, don't hesitate to
follow-up on the thread in the v4 mailing list.

On Monday, March 14th 2011 we hold our 1st meeting with the following
participants:

* Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
* Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
* Benjamin Mack (4.4 Release Manager)
* Steffen Kamper (4.5 Technical Leader)
* Ernesto Baschny (4.5 Release Manager)
* Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)


General Vision
==============

Xavier Perseguers pointed out his general vision of TYPO3 4.6 to be a
"rebase" which means that 4.6 shall define a new base for the further
TYPO3 versions. This means:
* get rid of deprecated parts in the TYPO3 core
* raise the requirement to PHP 5.3 (currently this was PHP 5.2) and use
this functionality provided by PHP
* define requirements of third party applications (e.g.,
ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick) and get rid of the maintainance problems of
supporting different and elderly versions
* improve existing parts of the Core concerning performance and/or
refactor them

TYPO3 4.5 LTS is available for at least three years and fully offers
backward compatibility. TYPO3 4.6 defines the new base for the feature
to be built on.

Since time is limited and quality must be assured, TYPO3 4.6 has a real
feature freeze. There won't be any exceptions for new features or to
finalize unfinished parts after that date. Anything that is not
considered to be feature complete will be postponed to the next TYPO3
version then.


Ideas, tasks & projects
=======================

* remove methods and classes that have been marked as deprecated before [1]
* improve the install tool and update wizards [2]
* clean up the code and thus lower the amount of PHP notices [3]
* make use of PHP 5.3 namespaces (e.g. in t3lib_div::makeInstance()) [4]
* lower the amount of $GLOBALS (e.g. BE_USER, DB) in the Core [5]
* support only the most recent version of ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick [6]
* integrate support for IPv6
* improve the Caching Framework concerning performance and enable it by
default
* drop the support for Internet Explorer 6

> Ernesto Baschny pointed out to be careful if vital parts of the Core
are touche (e.g. the $GLOBALS or TCE parts) and to do this very early in
the development phase to enable extension developers to modify and
re-publish their extensions. As such, we would like to do as much
cleanup as possible for alpha1 already.

* integrate Webservices (REST/SOAP)
* integrate DB maintainance scripts (e.g. to optimize unused space by a
scheduler task) [7]
* split the editor/admin backend users and introduce real roles in the
backend
* refactor the file structure and move TYPO3 source parts to be outside
of the document root
* integrate a notification system for security updates and the
possibility to update the system

> We agreed that automatically applying patches might not be possible in
all cases however we will evaluate this further and still aim to have a
solution here - even if it does not qualify for all and very individual
TYPO3 installations.

* replace about modules and create a new backend login page which is a
pluggable dashboard that combines task center, reports module and other
individual widgets
* finalize the new extension manager and just have one EM available
* use the new ExtJS tree in other places as well (filetree, element browser)
* integrate keyboard shortcuts into the TYPO3 backend
* integrate backup/restore functionality for a whole TYPO3 installation
to the Install Tool

[1] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17481
[2] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17353
[3] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17962
[4] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17964
[5] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17961
[6] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17960
[7] http://bugs.typo3.org/view.php?id=17965


Existing & Continued projects
=============================

* FAL (File Abstraction Layer)
* TCEforms Refactoring

> Results of this project must be integrated to the Core very soon. Even
if the whole project is not finished, parts that can be used stand-alone
already can be used. Generally most problems of the TCEforms Refactoring
are at the FlexForm and IRRE part (nested, repetitive elements).

* indexed_search / search API

> A mindmap [8] has been created to give an overview of the whole
project. Dmitry still aims to improve the architecture to have a
pluggable search API, he personally is in favour of the SphinxQL engine.

* init.php refactoring

> Helmut Hummel started to work on this project during the T3CSB11 and
want to provide a patch file of his modifications.

* fe_login

> Steffen Kamper wants to continue to refactor (e.g. extract the
redirect logic from the extension and have a redirect API for the core
that can be used for newsletter subscriptions, logins and checkout
processed) and fix the know bugs. However Tobias Liebig already started
to create an version based on Extbase which Steffen did not know about yet.

[8] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v4-search/wiki/Mindmap


Git & Gerrit
============

It's currently still unclear how to handle bigger projects with
Git/Gerrit. It would be nice to have feature branches for these projects
to have an easy way of merging changes back to the master branch later -
however one of the Git experts is required here to tell about the
technical possibilities.


Dates
=====

* *Feature Freeze and TYPO3 4.6 beta1 on August 2nd 2011*
  no new features and no exceptions after the feature freeze date
* Final Release of TYPO3 4.6.0 on October 25th 2011


Next steps
==========

The existing or inactive teams will be contacted to start communication
of their plans and to coordinate efforts for TYPO3 4.6. Xavier will
create a roadmap for the 4.6 development, however the most important
date of the feature freeze is already defined. The bugtracker's roadmap
tool is already used to reference bugs and features to be
fixed/implemented for a given release.
If you feel interested in a particular project or task, please reply on
the list or directly get in contact with Xavier Perseguers as Release
Manager of TYPO3 4.6.

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Cheers,
Olly
-- 
Oliver Hader
TYPO3 v4 Core Team Leader

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