[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 2nd meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

Mon Mar 28 11:28:09 CEST 2011

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

here are the notes of the 2nd meeting of the 4.6 Release Team.
Sorry for posting this late, the minutes of the 3rd meeting will be
published earlier...

The minutes are also available in the wiki of TYPO3 4.6:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-03-21_-_Minutes_from_the_2nd_meeting

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Minutes from the 2nd meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

*March 21st, 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 21st 2011 we hold our 2nd 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)
* Ben van't Ende (Community Manager)

Projects
========

The team members of existing and planned projects have been contacted by
mail and have been asked about their goal and vision for the particular
project in TYPO3 4.6.

Webservices
-----------

Xavier contacted the leaders of the webservice projects listed on Forge
* Extbase Webservices [1]
* TYPO3 Webservices [2]
* FLOW3 Package Webservices [3]

Besides the possibility to monitor a TYPO3 installation a general
webservice implementation in TYPO3 v4 shall allow to access and modify
data and to perform several actions.
It's required to have a general meeting very soon with the leaders and
members of the existing projects to discuss a common API for TYPO3 4.6.

[1] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extension-extbase_webservices
[2] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extension-typo3_webservices
[3] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/package-webservices

SCOTTY
------

SCOTTY is now a subproject of TYPO3 4.6 and acts as umbrella project for
all topics that are related to semantics and ontologies. Fabien Udriot
volunteers as leader of this project and takes care of arranging also
weekly meetings with the project members. The goal is to have at least a
common base in TYPO3 4.6, like e.g. having at least unique identifiers
for records.

FORMS Project
-------------

Patrick Broens still likes to contribute the results to TYPO3 4.6.
Currently Patrick dedicated on day per week for this project.

Backend Code Cleanup
--------------------

Jo Hasenau as leader was contacted but however there was no feedback yet
on the future goals and activities.

Backend Roles
-------------

This topic was discussed in the ECT list many months ago. A result of
the discussion there was the Roles Extension [4] which will be evaluated
by Xavier.

[4] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extension-roles2

Dashboard & Help Section & Combining Modules
--------------------------------------------

It's planned to have a static dashboard as the landing page of the
backend. The TYPO3 logo in the upper left corner shall be changed to
link to that dashboard instead of linking to typo3.com.
The help sections somehow seem to be lost at the end of the left
navigation bar. Xavier came up with the idea to combine these help
modules and have them linked all together with an accordant help icon in
the top bar. It turned out that there is currently no proper API to
modify and hook into the contents of the top bar - extensions like
beuserswitch [5] just overrides existing parts by XCLASSes or JavaScript.
Besides that existing modules shall be combined, e.g. the the statistics
section in the "DB check" module could be moved to the reports module.
Steffen Kamper and Xavier will discuss this in detail and continue on
the topic.

[5] http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/beuserswitch/current/

File Abstraction Layer
----------------------

A code sprint was planned to happen in April 2011. However since there
situation with the BLE project is unclear at the moment, the sprint will
be postponed by some more weeks.
Ben aims to arrange a general FAL Skype meeting with all project members
to discuss the next steps after the concept of FAL was been rethought
during the TYPO3 Code Sprint Berlin 2011 (T3CSB11).

Install Tool Improvements
-------------------------

Benni is working on a generic way of creating backups and restoring a
whole TYPO3 installation which shall be part of a new "snapshot manager"
in the install tool.
Steffen points out that the install tool needs a rework concerning
usability, e.g. the update wizards shall really behave like wizards.
This would also allow to have automatic setups and checks - e.g. if the
server supports it, saltedpasswords and HTTPS can be configured
automatically.

General ideas
=============

Xavier posted a list of ideas [6] to the TYPO3 v4 list. However there
was not that much feedback yet.

[6] http://lists.typo3.org/pipermail/typo3-project-v4/2011-March/002064.html

Mass Fileuploader
-----------------

Since plupload was dropped from being released in TYPO3 4.5, there were
some new activities to integrate a new mass fileuploader. The SWFUpload
that was introduced with TYPO3 4.3 has some drawbacks on using HTTPS
with self-signed certificates and cookies that only can be accessed with
the HTTP protocol (an accordant setting in the install tool).
The plupload version currently can be used with TYPO3 4.5 by using the
plupload extension from Forge [7].
Besides that Christian Müller started to work on an ExtJS based awesome
uploader [8] integration for TYPO3.
To have to possibility to easily use on of these implementations
additional hooks in the filelist module are required.

[7] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extension-plupload
[8] http://jsjoy.com/blog/ext-js-extension-awesome-uploader

Lightweight RTE
---------------

Ben and Steffen talked to Stanislas since he is the lead developer of
the RTE to have a lightweight version of it. Steffen mentioned that this
might be doable by introducing several new configuration options.

General issues
==============

Besides talking about TYPO3 4.6 also more general issues were discussed
during the Release Team Meeting.

TYPO3 4.5 Performance Ranting
-----------------------------

Some companies complained about the poor performance of TYPO3 4.5 in the
backend. Steffen Kamper and some developers from WMDB Düsseldorf
analysed that further and it seems that there are several issues that
need to be improved with the new pagetree and how the expand/collapse
states are stored in the session of a backend user. The loading of
nested pages in the pagetree also needs some improvements, currently
it's loaded node-by-node.
The loading mask which is shown until the accordant module data has been
loaded completely in the client can be disabled by using the extension
noloadingmask [9]

[9] http://typo3.org/extensions/repository/view/noloadingmask/current/

Current Localization
--------------------

It turned out the currently the TYPO3 4.5 is not fully translated to
French - thus there are still many parts that are shown with the default
label in English.
The problem here seems to be used extension llxmltranslate [10] which
does not show the missing/untranslated labels.
Olly wants to contact the author of that extension to evaluate how this
can be improved. Besides that there shall be also a project on Forge
concerning those translation, responsibilities and the workflow.

[10] http://forge.typo3.org/projects/show/extension-llxmltranslate

MENUDATA issue
--------------

The menu rendering generated several caches with the identifier
"MENUDATA" (there this issue is called like it is). This results in a
huge overhead of caches in TYPO3 websites with many pages and also turns
the cache to be obsolete since the lookup might take quite a while.
Since the current implementation is really tricky, the menu rendering
basically needs a complete rewrite. This could be done as a sponsored
project for example - the release team is going to talk about this in
detail in the next meeting.

Events
------

Steffen mentioned that he will be speaker at an ExtJS conference [11]
and wants to give some insights in the TYPO3 v4 implementations of ExtJS
and also some smaller presentation on how ExtJS is used in Phoenix/v5.

[11] http://www.sourcedevcon.eu/speakers.html

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
==========

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.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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