[TYPO3-v4] Minutes from the 7th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi dear TYPO3 community,

Now that I am back from my swiss military service, I'm glad to take over 
the preparation of the notes of the meetings of the 4.6 Release Team 
from now on.

Many thanks Olly for having prepared the previous minutes. I really 
appreciated getting started with my "job" as RM that smoothly!

OK, so here are the notes of the 7th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team.

The minutes are also available in the wiki of TYPO3 4.6:
http://forge.typo3.org/projects/typo3v46-projects/wiki/2011-05-09_-_Minutes_from_the_7th_meeting

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Minutes from the 7th meeting of the 4.6 Release Team

*May 9th, 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, May 9th 2011 we held our 7th meeting with the following 
participants:

* Xavier Perseguers (4.6 Release Manager)
* Oliver Hader (Core Team Leader)
* Ernesto Baschny (4.5 Release Manager)
* Benjamin Mack (4.4 Release Manager)

and partly with Steffen Kamper (4.5 Technical Leader) who was moving out.

Topics
============================

We started our meeting with a discussion regarding the packaging of 
TYPO3. We currently have 3 repositories:

1) base package: TYPO3 source code
2) blank package: content of what was known as "dummy", the skeleton site
3) introduction package: the ready-to-be-used official TYPO3 demo website

The packaging scripts have now been updated to work with Git instead of 
Subversion and the release of TYPO3 4.6.0 alpha1 will serve as the first 
real-life test for them.

Long awaited patch releases for TYPO3 4.5 and TYPO3 4.4 should then follow.

Regarding the introduction package, we came up with the conclusion that 
maintaining it for multiple branches of TYPO3 will be time-consuming for 
no real benefit. In fact, nobody would be interested in learning TYPO3 
with an old version. However, having an introduction package for the 
upcoming major release, 4.6, is a good opportunity to show and test new 
features. As such, we will be maintaining two versions of the 
introduction package, one for the stable branch (currently 4.5) and one 
for the development branch of TYPO3.

Sencha Conference
----------------------------

This ExtJS conference was a success and Steffen took the opportunity to 
make some demos of TYPO3 and show the attendees how we integrated the 
JavaScript framework within the TYPO3 Backend. Steffen had great 
discussions with a few ExtJS experts regarding speed issues we are 
encountering. As you may have read already, our main issue is the use of 
iframes that leads to loading the framework files again and again. We 
tried to reference JavaScript objects across iframes but ExtJS was never 
intended to be used like that and this does not work. A possible 
solution though would be to use so called "managed iframe" or switch to 
native panels instead of iframes for modules solely based on Extbase, 
Fluid and ExtJS.

Ongoing work
----------------------------

* Revamp of the list module is a topic since many years, we would like 
to "rethink" the whole module with the help of design and UX teams.
* Benni did some cleanup within the Install Tool. Integration of this is 
targeted for alpha2. If Fluid is properly decoupled from Extbase, output 
could even be based on this templating engine.

Indexed Search
----------------------------

Benni performed a small refactoring by adding a searchRepository and a 
searchController with two actions "form" and "search". The underlying 
concept is to let another repository (Solr for instance) being used.

Dmitry and Michael are working on improving the search logic.

As we would like to use Fluid to render the form, we plan to deprecated 
the existing Indexed Search plugin and create a new one in an attempt to 
ease to migration.

Other TYPO3 4.6 Projects
----------------------------

It was rather quiet in the last two weeks, but we got in touch with the 
different teams and are expecting to be able to integrate some part of 
their work in the coming weeks. Unfortunately not for alpha1 but dates 
have to be respected as much as possible and alpha2 is already on our radar.

Dates
============================

* TYPO3 4.6 alpha1 on May 11th 2011
* TYPO3 4.6 alpha2 on June 14th 2011
* 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.

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Cheers,
Xavier

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
Release Manager TYPO3 4.6

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